Who let the Drog out?

There can be no more fearsome sight in football than Didier Yves Drogba Tébily, head bowed, charging down a defender like an enraged stallion. It looked ferocious enough from the East Stand Upper Section at Stamford Bridge, where I sit, so God only knows what it must be like at pitch level with the Ivorian coming at you.

Drogba has been a formidable centre-forward for Chelsea these last eight seasons. Putting aside his ridiculous histrionics, his handbags-aloft huffing, puffing and sudden, life-threatening twinges when games have started to go against him, and, of course, his at-times comical diving talents, there hasn't been a player to wear the No.11 shirt quite like him - at Chelsea or any other team for that matter.

And now he is off, confirming this evening in a statement: "It has been a very difficult decision for me to make and I am very proud of what we have achieved, but the time is right for a new challenge for me."

Saturday night's Champions League triumph has, as expected, lowered the curtain on eight seasons of high-octane entertainment, when part of the fun of watching Chelsea has been wondering which Didier Drogba runs out onto the pitch.

"As a team we have accomplished so much," said Drogba's statement, "and have won every single trophy possible. Saturday was a very special moment for everyone at the club and for all the fans. I am very proud to have played my part in bringing many trophies to this club, which has been my home for the last eight years."

Drogba's statement was intended to hose down speculation - and confusion. Smart money is that he will join former Chelsea teammate Nicolas Anelka at Shanghai Shenhua in China, although his agents were still maintaining yesterday that a deal could be struck with Brer Abramovich and his team of shadowy advisers.

However, if Drogba accepts Zhu Jun's generous bag of silver, he will not only be lining the pockets of his family's future prosperity, but that of his foundation. This institution has become an increasingly important part of Drogba's life as he reaches the early stages of twilight in his playing career (he donated his £3 million endorsement fee for a Pepsi commercial to building a hospital in his hometown Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital).

If Drogba had remained at Chelsea for another season, age should not have been an issue. He is only 34, and injuries not withstanding, in excellent condition. Age has clearly not been a factor in Ryan Giggs' continued timeshare ownership of Manchester United's left flank, either, and he will be 39 in November (as long as he stays out of trouble in the bedroom...). Paul Scholes, exactly 12 months younger, has also proven that old dogs don't always lie around, drooling on the carpet (although the lateness of some of his tackles this season might suggest a certain age-related decline in his mental faculties...).

Wherever Drogba plies his trade next, evidence from the last few weeks has demonstrated that he is far from the knackers yard yet. His potency in front of goal, his love of the big stages - especially Wembley - and his tremendous work rate (when in the right frame of mind) have been exceptional in Chelsea's amazing, unlikely last few weeks, continually showing the sulky Fernando Torres what it's all about.

The Didier Drogba I've enjoyed more than any other at Chelsea has been the Drogba holding up opposition defenders one minute, scoring with a deft twist and a powerful volley, and then popping up as an auxiliary central defender in front of his own goalmouth minutes later. Few critics seem to recognise that side of him, such is their usual rush to leap on his obvious diving tendencies.

My spectacles aren't, though, so blue-tinted that I can ignore the theatrical aspects of Drogba's game. And we've seen as much of that side of him this season as any other: his continual rolling around, like a B-movie actor getting shot every three pages of script, may have successfully disrupted the home leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, but it was bloody annoying to watch.

Not surprisingly, we've let it go, but don't ever think that the mood in the stands is approving. We have regularly screamed ourselves hoarse for the upright Drogba, the Attack Drog and the Guard Drog, to perpetuate the awful back page headline puns. This is Didier - Team Player, the Drogba who, in the Champions League semi-final at Camp Nou was a powerful presence in the nine-man wall Chelsea erected in front of Petr Čech. Although the occasionally necessary forays back into his own penalty area haven't always been helpful (he conceded two penalties in consecutive European games in virtually the same circumstances each time), no one has ever been able to fault his team ethic.

Opposition fans, neutrals and defenders will be glad to see the back of Drogba but for us fans who've endured both the good and the bad of the club for most of our lives, we will be saying farewell to a remarkable workhorse.

We will be saying farewell to a striker who is Chelsea's 4th all-time scorer, ahead, even, of the legendary Peter Osgood - the King of Stamford Bridge. Drogba's 157 goals in all competitions, including more than 100 in the Premier League itself, have been capitalised further by his simply towering personality on the pitch, geeing up the fans when support has been felt to be lacking in a game. Drogba is a showman, and while not in the same league of all-round charisma as Gianfranco Zola or Thierry Henry, he has been - when on form - a player worthy of the entry ticket price alone.

I'm sure, as he leaves, there will be plenty of platitudes from within the club about Drogba having been "Chelsea through and through" (indeed he has said himself: "Chelsea is in my heart. My blood is blue and my heart even more so"), even if, like Patrick Viera, rumours of a departure have surfaced almost every summer since he joined from Marseille in 2004. But whatever loyalty Drogba has been able to summon in his eight seasons at the club, his legacy is assured.

If it hadn't been assured before, the last four weeks have locked it in tight. Drogba's remarkable history at Wembley, with seven goals in finals and semi-finals, has been augmented by that stunner against Tottenham in this season's FA Cup Semi-Final which led to a 5-1 rout. Then, just three days later, he delivered another blessed strike in the home leg of the Barcelona fixture. Back to Wembley again, the winner against Liverpool to win Chelsea the FA Cup itself.

Fittingly, poetically, romantically, even predictably, Drogba was centre-stage again in Chelsea's greatest night, it's greatest triumph.

His injury-time equaliser will go down in club history right up there next to Zola coming off the bench and scoring 20 seconds later to beat Stuttgart in the 1998 European Cup Winners Final. And while we're at it, Dennis Wise's unlikely equaliser in the San Siro against Milan in 1996.

The difference is that the equaliser in Munich on Saturday, just a couple of minutes after the hosts had taken the lead, was classic Drogba: timely, dramatic, game changing.

That he also scored the winning penalty in the inevitable shootout was possibly the work of an overactive Hollywood creative. Even now I'm suspicious of what I saw, but then so much has been an odd whirl since Saturday night, my head amongst them.

Now we know that Champions League Final was Didier Drogba's final game for Chelsea, and that fifth penalty his last kick in a blue shirt. Contrived or not, I'll take that as his sign off and happily walk  away from one of the greatest - and often most infuriating - player to have ever worn the blue shirt.

135 minutes late, tradition still intact

You really didn't want to be around me yesterday. Think of the most excited seven-year-old on Christmas morning, then amplify that level of annoying to the power of ten. Then you'd be getting close to what I was like. Then add in mild traces of hangover, thanks to indulging in White Russians with visiting rock stars at 2.30 in the morning.

I was probably best left alone, but that's pretty much how I should always be on FA Cup Final Saturday. I am just too excited by a spectacle, an event, an amassing of people around the world to watch a football match that will conclude several months of endeavour for both the biggest and the smallest teams in England.

This year, however, some chinless arse chose to move the fixture from its traditional kick-off to 5.15pm. 5.15pm on a Saturday is not a football kick-off time - it's when the news starts, or a Tom & Jerry cartoon, or some ghastly entertainment show with Noel Edmonds. Not the FA Cup Final.

The Cup Final kicks off at 3pm. End of discussion. It doesn't get moved to accommodate a lunchtime kickoff elsewhere, as there shouldn't be any other matches taking place on Cup Final Saturday. Nor should it be taking place at teatime simply to build an audience for Britain's Got Talent, or some other God-awful alleged talent show with a similarly grammatically-challenged name.

The FA Cup Final is more than just a football match. It is THE football match. It's a global event, watched around the world by 60 million people, the climax to the oldest football competition in the world. It is about tradition, which is why yesterday's final between Chelsea and Liverpool was about more than just whether it was a decent 90 minutes of football or not.

To the non-footballist, that might sound absurd, but the reason for my childlike skittishness each year - regardless of whether my team features in it or not - is what the Cup Final represents. Over successive years since I was a child, the Cup Final meant being in front of the TV at noon to watch the build-up - interviews with players present and old, the pundits and the minor celebrities who suddenly come out of the woodwork with a declared interest for one of the finalists or the other. Or Bruce Forsyth, who manages to turn up in any case.

Before the kick-off you have the obligatory live shots of the team buses arriving at Wembley, the players  walking across the Hallowed Turf™in their Cup Final suits, and then, as the teams start their warm-up routines, an hour or so of endless conjecture from anyone with a half-opinon about how the game will go.

Being at the game itself is a different experience altogether. There is nothing - nothing - to compare with hearing 80,000 people at Wembley singing Abide With Me followed by God Save The Queen (the original version, I should add, not the Sex Pistols' cover....) before the match gets underway, and then watching the incongruous sight of the regimental band of the Grenadier Guards criss-crossing the turf at half-time playing Colonel Bogey's March on something similarly rousing.

The "magic of the cup" might be a phrase you'll hear bandied about going back to the very early stages of the competition, when non-league clubs commence their well-intentioned efforts to proceed to later rounds when they might come up against professional league opposition.

And thus, come May, the denouement takes place at Wembley. It's a knockout competition, so the two teams have survived through guile, cunning and little luck along the way. They may not always be the best teams, either, but that doesn't matter, as the football is only just one component of Cup Final Saturday.

This year's Cup Final had an odd component to it, and not just because of the fact someone had tampered with the kick off time. Chelsea's season didn't seem to start until March 4, when Roberto Di Matteo was installed as "interim first team coach" and results, team unity and Fernando Torres' shooting boots all started to go the right way.

Liverpool have had a similarly indifferent season, with an expensive striker (Carroll) proving profligate in front of goal, and manager Kenny Dalglish - the closest thing to a saint, the Dalai Lama and royalty rolled into one person on Merseyside - facing questions from even the most loyal Scousers as to whether he is doing the right thing for the club.

By half-time yesterday, most pundits were commenting that the 131st FA Cup Final was a tepid affair. Ramires' clever goal putting Chelsea ahead at the interval, but that's all. When has this been ever different? It's hard to remember the last FA Cup Final that was an exciting display of football, of intelligent passing and clever build-play, of tactical ingenuity and perfect finishing. Watch any tie in the earlier rounds and you'll see 'win at any cost' being the motto. And that's why the Final itself is so much more the sum of its parts. Tradition, as I've said before, counts aplenty.

That Didier Drogba scored in his fourth FA Cup Final yesterday, that Ashley Cole has now amassed a record seven FA Cup winner's medals, and that Di Matteo became the third Italian manager in a row to win the trophy, on top of the fact he made records as a player (1997 - scoring for Chelsea on just 43 seconds), underlines the romance of the FA Cup and what it means to play or to watch it.

Yesterday's game may not have been perfect, but in many ways it was. Blues versus Reds, two teams who've played each other more than any one else over the last decade, a team that was going nowhere fast now competing for the two biggest club competitions in the game, and the seemingly fairytale of a caretaker manager who keeps pulling off remarkable successes (played 18, won 12, drawn 4, lost 2).

So it was a couple of hours late? The Magic of The Cup still exists. Roll on Munich.

99 posts later, there are still lines being crossed...or not

Ninety-nine posts ago, What Would David Bowie Do? made its debut with a lengthy diatribe about England's ignominious departure from the 2010 World Cup.

It was an angry rant, with its bile composed of England's piss-poor performance in South Africa, their ejection by Germany yet again, by the fact it was written exceedingly early on a Monday morning and during an arduous daily train ride to a destination I was growing decidedly antsy about, and by virtue of me being in a generally foul frame of mind, the reasons for which are best left unmentioned.

Viewed from a better perspective, the root of my bateyness was the fact that during England's final 16 encounter with Germany, Frank Lampard's delightful 38th-minute chip had bounced off the German bar and across the line so far the ball ended up in a different post code. Millions watching around the world saw it cross the line, as did most of the 40,510 spectators inside the Free State Stadium. I missed it as I was, at the time, somewhere beneath the English Channel where technology has yet to find a means of relaying radio signals. As it transpired, I wasn't alone in missing it: Uruguayan referee Jorge Larrionda, his two assistants and FIFA's fourth and fifth officials had also blinked just as the ball crossed the line.

It is unfortunately circuitous, then, that WWDBD?'s 100th post should fall on the occasion of another refereeing howler, again involving a team featuring Lampard, albeit with the prolific midfielder being on the victorious side this time. Chelsea's second "goal" in yesterday's FA Cup Semi-Final against Tottenham is not one I, as a Blues fan, will be particularly proud of. But if I'm uncomfortable at the goal standing, referee Martin Atkinson should be hiding his head in shame at allowing such a comical decision to stand.

Larrionda is said to have exclaimed "Oh my God!" when he later saw a replay of Lampard's disallowed goal. I wonder how hard and jagged was the item Atkinson swallowed when he saw video of various Spurs and Chelsea players bundled together like newly-betrothed snakes as Juan Mata's shot bounced off the sole of Benoit Assou-Ekotto's boot, effectively still in play.

According to Harry Redknapp, the referee has at least copped to his mistake: “[He's] watched it now and says he feels worse than I do. I said, ‘I don’t think so’. But he says he feels bad," the Spurs manager said afterwards. “He knows he’s made a mistake and he says he’ll have a bad week as well.”

So here we go with wave upon wave of renewed calls for goal-line technology and shallow defensive comments about referees being "only human", and indeed some are. Some are also splendidly gullible.

The argument against technology, certainly, is no longer tenable. When there are so many cameras around the ground that players can be punished retrospectively for off-ball incidents, it seems nonsense that decisions can't be made instantly when a disputed goal is scored. Or not.

Introducing technology has nothing to do with messing with the traditions of the game or even challenging the authority of the man in the middle. It's just that the pace of football now, coupled with the level of scrutiny afforded everyone except the match officials themselves is such that without technology they are disadvantaged.

We shall never know whether, had the goal been disallowed, the 5-1 scoreline would have been any different. It's possible that Spurs could have rallied, and beaten Chelsea handsomely. England, had Lampard's goal stood, may have also gone on to trounce Germany (although only the most myopic England supporter would have expected that, given the team's abject displays in the three games prior).

The absence of technology to conclude irrevocably that a goal had been scored has left us, yet again with more questions about how good our referees are in another weekend of big clubs, big decisions and big mistakes. There also remains questions about the moral fidelity of players. Diving, "simulation" or just plain old 'cheating' has rarely been further from attention than as now. So is there a difference between Ashley Young winning his second penalty in a week through another challenge to Tom Daley as Britain's greatest diving hope, and a ball not crossing the line, the referee attesting that it did, and the player with a claim to the 'goal' wheeling away as if he'd just struck a blinder?

To be fair to Juan Mata, the rush of blood to the head after you've put the ball in the back of the net (or at least sent it in that general direction) will blind the player to all other rational thought. Wembley is a magical place, and it's not just English schoolboys who dream of scoring on its hallowed turf. Can you really blame Mata for celebrating having, in his mind, added his name to Wembley lore?

And what about John Terry - should he have offered to set Atkinson straight? His admission, later, that "I thought it hit me and stayed out" does beg the response "Well, why didn't you tell the ref, then?" but given the season Chelsea's players have had, least of all Terry, it would take a particularly unusual player to have not taken that "ghost goal". It's not, either, as if it killed the game. Spurs are made of stronger fibre than that, and the fact that they clawed one back via Chelsea's season-long gappy defence, shows they weren't - at that point at least - going to just put their feet up. Until, of course, tiredness crept in, heads dropped and Florent Malouda, of all people, poked home Chelsea's fifth goal, following Ramires' cool third and Lampard's spectacular fourth.

I'll take that 5-1 win over Tottenham, but in my heart I'll regard it as 4-1. It's still an impressive scoreline for a Wembley encounter. The only note of real discomfort is the small minority who chose to disrespect the memories of the Hillsborough 96 and Livorno's Piermario Morosini, who collapsed and died 31 minutes into his Serie B game against Pescara the day before.

Football is only a game. It has its flaws and imperfections, but it is only a game. Spurs fans will be smarting, but compared with an FA Cup Semi-Final played on April 15th, 23 years ago, they will at least be able to go on smarting about a poor piece of refereeing for the weeks to come, as opposed to mourning the loss of 96 fellow human beings who left their homes one morning to watch a football match, and never came back. And that is something no replay can ever explain and certainly no technology can ever revoke.

A game of two halves (and other clichés)

When the final reckoning comes it is likely - and one of my sincerest hopes - that the accolade of 'Greatest English Footballer Ever' will be bestowed upon Jimmy Greaves.

In 157 appearances for Chelsea between 1957 and 1961 he scored 124 times, scoring on his debut for the club in 1957 and going on to achieve an as-yet unbeated club record of 41 league goals in the 1960-61 season. He then went to AC Milan, where he scored nine times in 12 appearances before coming back to London and finding the net a whopping 220 times in 321 outings with Spurs. On top of that, he is the third-highest goalscorer for England, with 44 goals in 57 appearances - a total which infamously excludes the 1966 World Cup Final, which Greaves missed.

Apologies for that statfest, but it allows me to tee up one further notable point about Greaves – that he has been the chief proponent (if not, possibly, originator) of football's greatest cliché: "It's a funny old game".

This five-word banality really doesn’t say anything at all, but at the same time says everything about how absurd football can be. Because – as a footballer will say - “at the end of the day” – football is a funny old game. 22 people kicking an inflated leather sphere up and down a pitch for 90 minutes before declaring one of the following – “We’re over the moon”, “We’re sick as a parrot” or “We came for a point and we’re going home with a point”.

I was musing on just how absurdly irrelevant football really is on Saturday evening as Fabrice Muamba lay in intensive care in a north London hospital.

Hours earlier he had suddenly slumped to the floor in Bolton Wanderers’ FA Cup Quarter-Final against Tottenham at White Hart Lane.

Now, this 23-year-old father of one, a child refugee from the bloodshed in his Zairean homeland, who arrived in England unable to speak English but applied himself academically and athletically to excellence, who became a hugely popular – if not technically gifted – footballer at Arsenal, Bolton and the England Under-21s, was fighting for his life (and, as I write, still is).

To exacerbate football’s absurdity further, as Muamba continued his brave battle yesterday afternoon, Chelsea sent out Fernando Torres to lead the attack in their own FA Cup Quarter-Final against Leicester City at Stamford Bridge.

Torres, you’ll recall, had cost Chelsea a ridiculous £50 million when they bought him from Liverpool in January 2011. You’ll also recall that Torres had not scored a goal, professionally, in 151 days (or more than 25 hours spent on a football pitch) - not the expected return on a striker, least of all one commanding such a price.

So when the blond one known in his native Madrid as El Niño, mostly dribbled the ball past the hapless Kasper Schmeichel on 67 minutes, it was understandable that Stamford Bridge – which had, an hour earlier, warmly applauded Muamba in sympathetic unity – rose to its feet in raptures as if they had witnessed a Biblical miracle.

A second was to follow almost 20 minutes later, causing those of a religious persuasion in the stands to immediately abandon any plans to visit Lourdes and stay rooted in London SW6.

Which led to me thinking about that other noble footballing cliché – “a game of two halves”. Because it really is a game of division, between those work hard to become great and those who have greatness thrust upon them, and then have struggle to live up that greatness.

Torres demonstrated at Athletico Madrid and at Liverpool what a lethal striker he is. Whether the two goals he scored for Chelsea yesterday finally unleash the demons that were preventing him extending that reputation for lethality remain to be seen.

And even if he now goes on to exceed Jimmy Greaves’ club record of league goals in a single season (not impossible, of course, but even if Chelsea face opposition comprised entirely of multiple amputees in their remaining fixtures this season, it’s as likely as Rafa Benitez becoming the next secretary of the Chelsea Supporters Club), Chelsea fans will naturally be beyond elation. But right now, the only thing that matters in this beautiful game is that one particular 23-year-old, who has united the entire world of football behind him, pulls through and makes it to his 24th birthday three weeks from now.