Inter Milan and Mourinho have done it. Chelsea president Abramovich must be fuming after his team gets booted out of the Champions League once again, and were taught a lesson is tactical football they’re wise not to forget.
The game itself wasn’t incredible or exciting the way we tend to look at it. I’m an adept of the beautiful game myself, but when you’ve been in this world long enough, you learn to appreciate the tactical subtlety of snuffing out a key player out of the game as much as you appreciate that same player scoring amazing goals. And this, the snuffing, is what happened in this match, only x11. Inter Milan completely dominated Chelsea’s forward lines. And if in the first few minutes Drogba and co. looked like they could pull out of the Italian straitjacket they were wearing, soon it was clear for everyone that, safe from a major distraction from an Inter man or a natural disaster, that would never happen.
The goal came late in the second half, by no other than Eto’o. But by then it was clear that Inter would go through, with the goal adding insult to injury. We’ll see how far this Inter Milan team advances in the Champions League but, so far, they have beaten a likely finalist.
