London is Blue Dispatch #019

It took about five minutes for all of Mauricio Pochettino’s prophecy to come true. 90 seconds into the game, Conor Gallagher snapped into a challenge on Destiny Udogie and sent him sprawling to the green. Gallagher hung over Udogie for a second, like Ali over Sonny Liston, and then impudently poked the ball away. A minute later, Caicedo crunched into Maddison and had him howling and rubbing his hamstring furiously. Both would leave the field eventually, and for different reasons.

Just minutes later, with their first shot on goal, Spurs scored. It was beautiful, incisive football – a pass to the pocket on the sides of the DMs in a 4-2-3-1 which was exploited by Maddison, a switch to the other pocket for Sarr. Kulusevski came 1v1 with Colwill and as has been Chelsea’s fortune, hit Colwill and sent Sanchez the wrong way.

At this point, it would have been easier to cave in to what had been echoed repeatedly in the lead up to the Spurs game – that the balance of power had shifted in London. Here were Spurs, now on their way to the top of the table, while the Blues were the balancing counterweight at the other end, slipping downwards from 11^th. 72.7%. That was the percentage of their PL goals this season that Spurs had scored in the second half. 72.7% was also the percentage of PL goals this season Chelsea had conceded in the second half. That meant either turning the game around in forty minutes, or defying the odds in the 2^nd.

I must admit it took me a second watch, with a calmer head to see why I was left livid even after a comprehensive 4-1 win. In my head, we had been up against 10 men for 34 minutes, and against nine men for 43, and it wasn’t until the last three minutes that we got two goals and made the tie absolutely safe. When at 2-1, Spurs had scored an offside goal thanks to an unmarked far post runner, and almost conceded a legitimate equalizer when Bentancur missed from three yards out. All this, while playing against a kamikaze highline that would have gifted Erling Haaland the golden boot in November.

On second watch though, there was sympathy for circumstance. You could see a team torn between the fear of conceding to nine men and between exploiting Postecoglu’s provocative defensive setup. “It was the weirdest game I’ve played in, I think,” said Gallagher said. “It was something we haven’t really worked on, playing against a line of six, seven defenders on the halfway line. We were offside a lot but that’s going to happen and eventually we got in a few times and got out goals.”

It has been quite some time since the (in)famous Battle of the Bridge, and eons since a Chelsea team became better when the games became uglier. For all the nice football Chelsea have played these past weeks and lost, the jarring absurdity of watching the Blues indulge once more in the dark arts to make the game murky and win, maybe sparked off anger at the unfamiliar.

Chelsea’s foul count per 90 was close to 10 a game before the derby. Against Spurs, there were 21 infringements from the Blues. When Palmer equalized with a thumping penalty, the 21-year-old shushed the crowd, a gutsy, admirable and perhaps surprising gesture offered in a pressure cooker environment. Colwill, snapped into Sarr and pushed him away multiple times, before swatting away an increasingly irate Bissouma. When the third goal went in, Pochettino wasn’t pumping his fists; he was furious with the positioning of one of his players. Post game, Gallagher went to shake Bissouma’s hand and the Malian reacted with venom, still seething from what felt more like four low blows than one knockout punch. It was pure, unadulterated chaos and Chelsea had finally shown they could revel in it.