Chelsea v Manchester United Champions League Final 2008

Midnight in Moscow and the Premier Show on Earth:
Sean O'Conor

Was it just me or was there something surreal about this year's Champions League final?

It was partly the teams involved – two 'English' ones, but with only nine of the 22 players on show coming from England (ten if you count the Canuck ex-Welsh schoolboy international Owen Hargreaves), two non-English coaches and somewhat shady non-English directors, how English really was the occasion?

This was the spectre of the aborted 'Game 39' made flesh - the new football on show for the world to cheer, conclusive proof that the Premier League product is the world's favourite football, an embodied dream for Sky TV and their 'year zero' statistics.

But please, watching expensively-assembled international elevens slug it out overseas was nothing to get patriotic about in the home of football, especially in the year our national team failed to qualify for the European Championship.

I supported ABC (Anyone But Chel$ki) on the night, only because the Blues' meteoric arrival on the big stage has up-ended the football universe I thought I had understood after years of earnest studying - a slowly-shifting hierarchy of empires and aspiring challengers, not a plaything for international playboys where perennial also-rans become unstoppable behemoths with one sudden flash of a cheque book!

To underline the gulf in real heritage between the teams, while Manchester United had the legendary Sir Bobby Charlton to lead them up the steps (why exactly do UEFA request a director does this instead of the team captain?), Chelsea had turncoat money-man Peter Kenyon, formerly of Old Trafford, leading them up.

Manchester United are no little family affair of course. But while the cameras lingered on Roman Abramovich and his latest squeeze, sitting in the only wooden stands I have seen at a top-level stadium outside of Craven Cottage, the infamous Glazers, who seized control of United after a protracted struggle, before lumping it with enormous debts, were oddly nowhere to be seen.

Yet United remain a club who treasure their long and storied history, and that matters in our sport, as the pictures of 1958 commemorative messages in the stadium and Sir Bobby ascending the winners' steps at the end rightly reminded us.

Sir Bobby's melancholy face after the match remained an enduringly poignant image, as if his memories of that cold night in Munich 50 years ago were all too raw for him to celebrate his beloved club's triumph in the Moscow monsoon of 2008.

It was also the setting that was weird - a midnight kick-off in Russia of all places. The European nation that veers geographically and culturally towards Asia is a megalithic state never fond of democracy, but flexing its imperial wings once again, ineffably steered by ex-KGB goons, dubious nouveau-riche oligarchs and apparatchiks.

For the first time, Chelsea fans could see one of them, Abramovich, the billionaire from nowhere, in his natural habitat, but the club's other Eastern hero, Ukrainian marksman Andriy Shevchenko, remained on the bench for the duration and ended up the sadly forgotten man of the final.

How amazing to think the Milan legend, before he arrived at Stamford Bridge, was the continent's No.1 striker for the past decade.

Russia actually came out of the whole affair pretty well in the end. The banded-about fears of Soviet-style police brutality, local toughs ambushing naive Englishmen abroad and the hastily-laid Slovakian turf cutting up disastrously during the game proved to be largely unfounded hysteria.

As a consequence, Muscovites could have smugly pointed to their own powers of hospitality to English fans, compared to the experience of the Russian supporters of Zenit St Petersburg at the UEFA Cup Final in Manchester a week earlier, when Rangers yobs started an almighty riot.

The football was not bad either, a refreshing tonic to the sterile defensive chess games finals too often turn out to be. Both coaches should be congratulated for telling their players to attack, creating an absorbing spectacle for the watching millions.

But please spare me the Sky-soaked fools who were ringing up the phone-ins to proclaim it as the greatest European Cup final of all time.

'All time' to them probably means since the Premiership was born in 1993, which would exclude such classics as Real Madrid's 7-3 demolition of Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960 and the same team's 3-2 yo-yoing win over Milan two years earlier.

Or, if you want to cite more recent finals, Liverpool and Milan's unforgettable 3-3 game in Istanbul in 2005, or even Barcelona's tense 2-1 edging of Arsenal in Paris a year later.

Chelsea clearly could and should have won in Moscow, were football a game in which victories are earned not by goals scored but by attacking ambition alone.

After a first 45 minutes bossed by the Red Devils, the Blues out-ran and out-fought their opponents for most of the remaining hour and a quarter of play, thrusting through the middle with increasingly ominous intent as the game wore on and hitting the woodwork twice in the process.

Their last golden chance arrived with John Terry's penalty to bag the trophy, before the Russian rain took its toll and made the Chelsea captain slip as he was taking his spot kick.

Incidentally, when are UEFA and FIFA going to clamp down on players stopping in their run-ups to penalties, as Cristiano Ronaldo did in Moscow? They have enforced the rule that goalkeepers cannot advance from their line before the ball is struck, so why have the penalty-takers still got such an advantage in trying to commit the goalie first?

Terry, despite his unpleasant displays of yob culture off-field in the past, sparked axiomatic sympathy with his manifest distress at having seen his chance of glory slip cruelly from his hands.

How interesting that Terry's missed kick is the one attracting the attention of the post-mortems, instead of the mediocre Nicolas Anelka effort that finally handed Man U the cup.

'The Incredible Sulk' has stayed loyal to his reputation, revealing he refused to take one of the five allotted penalties, while at the same slamming his already under-fire coach Avram Grant for sending him on so hastily and positioning him on the right wing instead of up front.

Grant looks like losing his job as soon as Abramovich can tempt a big name to Stamford Bridge, which given his limitless lucre, does not seem that long a wait.

This would be a shame as the Israeli took on an impossible job in September and having run Man U mighty close to the Premier League title, he did what Jose Mourinho failed to do and reached a Champions League Final. Had lady luck been on his side, Grant would now fairly be Europe's champion coach of 2008.

Spoilt brats like Didier Drogba may not respect him, but Grant, unlike predecessor Jose Mourinho, displayed admirable dignity in his role as Chelsea's chief and proved you do not have to act all whistles and bells to be a resounding success.

Grant's opposite number Sir Alex Ferguson bolstered his reputation with a second European Champions Cup, equaling fellow British coach Brian Clough, who was a winner twice with Nottingham Forest, and one behind Bob Paisley, who won three with Liverpool.

Who knows how long Fergie can continue. After 2008's double triumph, it becomes yet harder to see the 66 year-old calling it a day. His passionate attacks since the final on Real Madrid's relentless pursuit of his starlet Ronaldo leave us in no doubt he is no hurry to vacate his throne.

The increasingly pounding rain that drenched the closing stages of the Champions League Final cooled the rising tension of the game itself, and possibly helped quell any trouble outside the Luzhniki afterwards.

That said, the long-range away trips the thousands of fans had embarked upon, costing them an arm and a leg in the process, and the awesome surroundings, had made for a somewhat subdued atmosphere in the large bowl anyway.

Those voices proclaiming this grand-slam showdown as a great advert for the Premier League had obviously not watched some of the dire fare on offer from outside the big four in our elite division this season.

Any game between Chelsea and Manchester United inhabits its own universe anyway these days, whatever the venue.

The other big guns of Europe will be back with a vengeance, rest assured, to derail any 'English' pretensions to hegemony, so any repeat of the six consecutive English European Cup wins from 1977 to 1982 is unlikely.

The giants of Italy, Spain and Germany are reloading their weaponry, the top French, Dutch and Portuguese sides too, and following Zenit's win in Manchester, we need to keep an eye on the Russian revolution as well.

But at the end of the day, all external factors aside, as a simple 90 minutes (plus extra-time and penalties) of knock-out soccer, the 2008 Champions League final was simply a good game.

Sean O'Conor

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