Football: Flo fuels Chelsea's furious onslaught

CHAMPIONS' LEAGUE: Chelsea 3 Feyenoord 1; Vialli's men emphatically shake off erratic Premiership form to enhance European hopes

CHELSEA RESUMED their Champions' League campaign with a comfortable win against the team that will almost certainly prove to be Group D's softest touch. A goal by Celestine Babayaro two minutes before the interval and a second-half pair by Tore Andre Flo scarcely reflected the measure of Chelsea's superiority over the Dutch champions, who can thank their goalkeeper, Jerzy Dudek, for the fact that the score did not reach double figures.

So complete was Chelsea's command that in the final minutes they were able to withdraw Didier Deschamps and give a brief debut to Samuele Dalla Bona, the captain of Italy's Under-18 team. It was not the fault of Dalla Bona, a left-sided midfield player, that a moment's complacency in the home defence gave Julio Cruz the chance to pull a goal back in the 90th minute.

Feyenoord were the first Dutch winners of this competition, when they beat Celtic 2-1 in the 1970 final with a team that included the great midfielders Wim van Hanegem and Wim Jansen. But their visit did not appear to have stirred the emotions of the London public, to judge by the muted applause as the teams took the pitch. The welcome was more suited to an early round of the Worthington Cup.

The visitors' coach, Leo Beenhakker, is one of Europe's most experienced tacticians, but he has yet to take a team to the final stages of the European Cup. The tactics behind his team's unbeaten record in the first phase of this season's competition became clear when they lined up with five defenders, leaving Somalia, their burly new Brazilian striker, to forage for himself up front.

Dudek gave the first indication that this was to be his night as much anyone's when he blocked Gustavo Poyet's flying scissor kick after 12 minutes. Feyenoord answered a few seconds later when Bonaventure Kalou cut in from the right for a shot which Ed de Goey diverted at the expense of a corner. That was their first shot, and there were to be only three more, compared with Chelsea's total of 37 - 19 of them on target, over the 90 minutes.

If Feyenoord's lack of willingness to mount attacks was an embarrassment, then so was Chelsea's failure to show a better profit from an endless string of chances, many of them coming from their 18 corner kicks, 14 of them in the first half. Time and again they were thwarted by Dudek, giving substance to his claims that Manchester United are showing an interest in him. His most spectacular intervention, albeit a completely inadvertent one, came when he stooped to gather Flo's harmless long-range ground shot in the 14th minute, only for the ball to bounce off a divot and strike him in the forehead, bouncing away to safety.

Dudek's legs were the next part of his anatomy to see action, as Wise's point-blank shot ricocheted to safety. In the minutes before the interval he was forced to hold on to Flo's 20-yard dipper and to tip a 25-yard rocket from Gianfranco Zola over the bar. After 43 minutes he finally cracked, unable to find anything to put in the way of the emphatic far- post header with which Babayaro met Dan Petrescu's deep cross from the right.

His trials had barely begun. Petrescu shook his crossbar with a header from Albert Ferrer's cross shortly after the interval, and in the next minute the Romanian was unable to manoeuvre himself into position to put away an inviting rebound when Dudek beat away Zola's shot.

Ten minutes into the second half Beenhakker tried to change his team's pattern by replacing two midfield men, Jon Dahl Tomasson and Peter van Vossen, with two attackers, Cruz of Argentina and Radoslav Samardzic of Yugoslavia. But the denuded Dutch midfield found it even harder to deny Chelsea opportunities, and eventually the scoreline took on a more realistic appearance.

Zola crossed from the left, Petrescu headed the ball back from beyond the far post, Babayaro crashed a header against the bar and Flo hit the rebound home. The brave Dudek managed to get an unavailing hand to the shot, but he could do no better with five minutes to go when Flo added a third, needing two bites to put away Zola's nifty back-heeled pass.

"We were a joy to watch tonight," Gianluca Vialli, the Chelsea coach, said. "When we play like that, we're a threat to anybody." But Lazio's 2-0 win in Marseilles, extending their unbeaten run in Europe to 17 matches, suggests the battle for the second qualifying place in the group will be between the representatives of the English and the French leagues.

Chelsea (4-4-2): De Goey; Ferrer, Leboeuf, Desailly, Babayaro; Petrescu, Wise, Deschamps (Dalla Bona, 87), Poyet (Di Matteo, 87); Flo, Zola. Substitutes not used: Cudicini (gk), Hogh, Goldbaek, Morris, Harley.

Feyenoord: (4-1-3-1): Dudek; Van Gobbel, Konterman, Van Wonderen, De Visser; Van Gastel; Kalou, Tomasson (Cruz, 57), Bosvelt, Van Vossen (Samardzic, 59); Somalia. Substitutes not used: Graafland (gk), Rasza, Paauwe, Korneev, De Haan.

Referee: J-M Garcia Aranda (Sp).

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