Chelsea back in winning mood
By Tim Rich
Sport.Telegraph, 27th September 2007
Avram Grant's wife, a woman flamboyant enough to make Nancy Dell'Olio seem
like Norma Major, presents her own television show in Israel, called True
Questions.
Abramovich was right to spare himself the journey. After Sunday's defeat by
Manchester United, the former Chelsea captain, Marcel Desailly, had made an
impassioned appeal for the club's supporters to remember that Chelsea had
survived the departures of Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli; men who at the
time had seemed as pivotal to Chelsea's future as Jose Mourinho.
This was the kind of victory that, had you woken from a week-long coma, you
would assume came from a side still associated with him. In Mourinho's three
seasons at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea never remotely looked like losing to
lower-division opposition – and nor did they last night.
And yet not even when Salomon Kalou converted his second goal and Chelsea's
fourth nine minutes from time did the travelling support mention Grant's name.
Even when the match was long-since done you could hear a faint echo, sung to
the Waltz of the Toreadors, of "Jose Mourinho, Jose Mourinho" dissolving into
the night skies.
The "Special One" banner that Chelsea's supporters had rallied behind at Old
Trafford on Sunday was not at the KC Stadium last night but the first and last
chants were all about a man whose ghost dominates the club he has left in the
way that Brian Clough and Kevin Keegan haunted Derby and Newcastle. At the
Baseball Ground, Clough's successor, Dave Mackay, coped; at St James' Park,
Kenny Dalglish did not. With the pick of Europe's coaches, from Guus Hiddink to
Marco van Basten, standing in the shadows, Grant still needs more than 4-0 wins
over sides who are 18th in the Championship.
Maybe it is time for perspective. This was the sixth time the cups had taken
Chelsea to Humberside and they had sometimes arrived in a far worse state than
now. Their 2-0 victory at Boothferry Park in 1982 was at the time Chelsea's
ruinous debt was threatening to turn Stamford Bridge into a particularly
expensive housing estate. This may be a crisis but there have been worse.
When Scott Sinclair drilled his shot with geometric precision into the corner
of Bo Myhill's goal in the 37th minute, the crisis began to ease. And as Kalou
headed into a virtually unguarded net, it was clear that the gulf between the
two sides could not be spanned even by the sweeping girders of the Humber
Bridge. After the 52nd minute, when Steve Sidwell hammered home his first
goal in a Chelsea shirt, thoughts began to stray to Chelsea's last visit to
Humberside under Vialli, which ended in a 6-1 rout in the FA Cup.
Although they carried their greatest threat when the game was irretrievably
lost, Hull did exactly what might be expected of them. They began the night
shooting fireworks into the chill night air and hired a rather splendid opera
singer, who, for those still concerned by the Divorce of Jose, reeled off a
number from The Marriage of Figaro and inevitably, Nessun Dorma, which was
introduced as "a song about winning".
If Hull were to grab the most memorable victory in their history, then you
imagined that Jay-Jay Okocha would have to play some part in it all. The
great Nigerian sparked one flicker of the old brilliance, pulling back a
pass that Stephen McPhee drove just over the bar.
That was the closest Hull were to come until they were three goals down.
Their manager, Phil Brown, who got to know Grant when negotiating Tal
Ben-Haim's transfer to Bolton as Sam Allardyce's assistant, thought Chelsea
unlucky to have lost at Old Trafford and thought them clinical here.
Given the controversy that has surrounded the Chelsea captain, Grant was
right to start with John Terry, who made one critical interception and then
on the final whistle kissed his badge and threw his shirt into the crowd.
Terry is not the sort of man to endure humiliation and he was not about to
begin now.
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