Chelsea more than one man banned

Was more coverage of a football match ever devoted to an absent friend than that the missing Jose Mourinho received at Chelsea's Champions' League game with Bayern Munich last Wednesday?

Was more coverage of a football match ever devoted to an absent friend than that the missing Jose Mourinho received at Chelsea's Champions' League game with Bayern Munich last Wednesday? The manager's notes in the programme could have been headed with one of those wonderful old journalistic tags like "The Man They Couldn't Gag" and "Love Him Or Loathe Him, You Can't Ignore Him".

In among the knockabout stuff of Wednesday's column, however ("The players want our masseur, Billy McCullough, to sit on the bench tonight with my coat and scarf on!") was a nugget of thoughtful and provocative intelligence as usual, this time on the mentality of two-leg football.

Once again Mourinho, his Porto and Chelsea teams unbeaten on aggregate in three years of such ties, overturned conventional thinking, suggesting: "In the first leg I never feel the pressure of having to win or not concede because we are at home. Nor is there pressure to score or draw just because you are playing away. I hate this kind of mentality. I've told the players already that I don't want it."

He quotes the Carling Cup semi-final success against Manchester United: "We played them at home and couldn't beat them, but didn't panic and went away and won the second leg." The message to players, supporters and (not least) the opposition was that if Bayern, like United, were lucky enough to grind out a draw, then so be it - Chelsea were good enough to do their stuff in the second match. As it happened, the job was almost completed first time around on this occasion, until the poetic justice in stoppage time of Ricardo Carvalho being penalised for a minor version of the foul he had perpetrated on Barcelona's goalkeeper to win the previous round.

Michael Ballack's successful penalty brought temporary deflation to the Chelsea dugout, the scene of so much activity during the game, and defiant celebration from the hordes of Bayern supporters behind it, who applauded their team from the pitch in the belief that a 4-2 deficit would not be impossible to overturn in the Olympic Stadium on Tuesday. But after even a brief period of reflection, Chelsea's players knew that they held a strong, upper hand, summarised by the outstanding Frank Lampard: "The only disappointment is not having a three-goal cushion, but it was a great night. At one-all we showed great character and played great football, similar to how we played against Barcelona in the first 20 minutes, and when we play like that there's not many teams who can stop us scoring goals."

Although the dizzy tempo was similar in those two critical periods, the method was different, prompting aggrieved criticism from Bayern's England midfielder, Owen Hargreaves, about primitive British long-ball stuff, such as his team had encountered against Celtic's John Hartson and Chris Sutton a couple of years ago. "Maybe we played with a bit of an English style second half," Lampard admitted. "We stuck the ball up there a few times and pushed in and played with high pressure and high tempo. But there's two ways of doing it: lumping it with no thought or no quality, or doing it with quality, and we did it with quality." In Didier Drogba, playing one of his best games for the club, Chelsea also found the right combination on the night of power and sophistication at the receiving end.

Hargreaves performed well in the first half but tended to be bypassed in the second, which helped explain his frustration after being given the opportunity to impress potential Premiership suitors that had been largely denied him over two earlier games against Arsenal. Patrick Vieira and the young Mathieu Flamini, with Fredrik Ljungberg and Robert Pires outside them, had proved no match for the German midfield, who then found the going much tougher against Claude Makelele, Lampard and the cleverly remodelled Eidur Gudjohnsen, with Joe Cole and Damien Duff far more effective down the flanks than their Arsenal counterparts. It was an instructive comparison, explaining in large measure why the balance of power in London football has moved south-west this season. Then, of course, there are the respective defences and goalkeepers, Arsenal's having been found so badly wanting in Munich, where they effectively lost the tie.

It is difficult to believe that Chelsea will be as generous on Tuesday, all the more so now that Petr Cech has the rare motivation of a preventable goal to atone for. "The shot went through the wall, so I saw the ball a little bit late," he said of Ze Roberto's initial drive that led to the unexpected equaliser. "I tried to push it away as big as I could, but unfortunately the Bayern guy [Bastian Schweinsteiger] put it in. It's a pity the penalty was given and maybe there's hope now for Bayern, but they're two down and it's up to them to put the pressure on us. We've played really well this season away and we can go there with confidence."

Cech said that a team meeting on the morning of the game was the last the players had seen or heard of Mourinho that day, Lampard confirming that they felt as well prepared as ever: "He prepares so thoroughly for every game and did the same [this time]. When you get to that stage, things are almost implanted in your brain, and once you go out there, you're responsible for yourself and the team. You trust the squad [of assistants] he's got behind him. They speak the way he speaks. I won't go down the route of saying, 'That win was for Jose,' but it's a nice feeling when you know what's happened and feel he shouldn't be banned."