Chelsea restore the natural order but must defy it against Barcelona | Jonathan Liew | OneFootball

Do Chelsea get it done? You might as well ask in what direction the apple falls from the tree. There is an inevitability to them here, an infallible logic to their challenges and their combinations and their fighting and their running, a sense that the natural order of the universe is simply reasserting itself.

As it turned out the last half-hour at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday was a kind of omen, a trailer for the feature presentation. Here the intensity so lacking in the first leg in Manchester was there from the start. By half-time City are red-faced, not out of embarrassment  but exhaustion, as if not just the energy but the simple resolve has been drained from them. It’s three-nil, and to be quite honest Chelsea left a few more out there.

The consensus before this game was that Chelsea’s superior bench would end up pulling them through. Uh, no. The deficit has been scrawled clean long before a single substitute has entered the pitch, and in fact it is Nick Cushing’s changes who have the greatest impact. Laura Coombs comes on and solidifies things in midfield. Jess Park’s arrival allows Mary Fowler to step out of the firing line and into the deeper positions where she does her best work.

City do not lie down. Something about the upheaval of the past few weeks seems to have bound them tighter. A new coach (actually the old coach), a brutal run of injuries, a front three basically trying to pretend they know each other. There is plenty of character here, but as the minutes tick away they are patently out of solutions. Chelsea’s immense gravitational pull has swallowed them too.

So what shifted in the past eight days? In part, this was simply a case of superior problem-solving, Sonia Bompastor thumbing through her giant ring of keys until she found the one that worked. Sandy Baltimore gets swallowed up by Kerolin in the first leg, so you bring in Niamh Charles for the league game. Charles struggles and so you bring Baltimore back, but with Lauren James as extra protection, and James responds with a performance of pure, remorseless hunger.

James frankly merits an entire article to herself. Whether going forward or going back, she imposes herself totally, a player out of your very worst nightmares. There is an impressive impatience to her, too: she never accepts the easy foul, never takes the easy pass until she has exhausted every other possibility, refuses to run the ball into the corner at the end.

But to home in on a single player would really be to miss the point of Chelsea here, a unit in which every single part played its part. Mayra Ramírez was basically unplayable, like trying to stop water. Whatever shape you take she defines herself against it, whatever force you exert on her she multiplies back towards you.

The teenage midfielder Wieke Kaptein repaid Bompastor’s faith by shutting down Yui Hasegawa all evening. The back four were unyielding, the crowd of 10,769 small but hostile, bringing the noise and the nastiness early on.

And for all Chelsea’s excellence on the pitch this season – for many seasons, in fact – these moments of total alignment are still vanishingly rare. Most of the time when Chelsea win the crowd are largely immaterial. Domestically at least, Chelsea have basically become too good for their own good, too frictionless, too efficient at extinguishing jeopardy, too allergic to real adversity.

This has cultural repercussions too. If you’re one of the many unattached new fans coming into the women’s game, are you really going to pledge your allegiance to the (soon to be) six-in-a-row champions? Perhaps this helps to explain why Chelsea can attract only 10,000 to a huge Champions League game at Stamford Bridge, a ground that still feels like a temple to the men’s team with a little Emma Hayes plaque attached.

The murals are all of Chelsea men. The club legends on the Shed Wall are all men. Even the two posters outside the club shop are of Cole Palmer and Reece James. Surely on some level the team must sense that absence of warmth, that conditional love, a stadium that is occasionally loaned to them but will never quite be theirs.

Arguably not since the famous comeback against Lyon in 2023 has this place really felt like a natural extension of the team.

Maybe this feels nit-picky. But in a month’s time Chelsea face the biggest test in the sport, a Barcelona team that represent a kind of final-boss challenge, and in order to conquer it they will need to soak every last drop of home advantage out of an ambivalent public. For the last few years Chelsea have become experts at exerting the natural logic of football. Now they have to try and defy it.

Header image: [Photograph: Alexander Canillas/SPP/Shutterstock]