Freeze our assets. Curtail our hotel allowance. Link our 19 years of unbroken success to the enabling of a blood-stained dictator. It seems that the show really does go on – for now anyway – as on a crisp, clear Norfolk evening the players of Chelsea dished up an entertaining 3-1 Premier League defeat of an energetic Norwich.
Welcome to Chelsea, the afterlife: a place that felt, as the Norwich fans sang about dirty Russian money, like another lurch into the deeply strange parallel timeline of football and geopolitics in the year 2022.
News of the sanctions imposed on Roman Abramovich had emerged shortly after 9am on Thursday morning. By lunchtime the boulevards of Norwich’s pedestrianised city centre were thronged with Chelsea supporters singing the blues away. We’ve got Tommy Tuchel: he knows just what to do. In which case, perhaps he could share it with the rest of us. Because nothing right now makes a great deal of sense.
As Chelsea’s away fans kept up an early wave of noise close to kick off there was a valedictory, Viking Funeral-style air about their boisterous good spirits, a sense of good cheer, of event-glamour about all this. Humans are odd creatures. Give us a tribe, a hill to die on: any hill, and often that’s enough.
Tuchel had picked an everyday Chelsea team for this most otherworldly of occasions, rotating some key parts but retaining the first choice forward line that sees Kai Havertz settled as the focal point. Tuchel could be excused feeling a little demob-unhappy. One thing does seem certain: Chelsea finally have a manager they can’t, under current UK law, actually sack.
Otherwise it was business as usual. With one minute gone at Carrow Road Chelsea’s fans were singing “Roman Abramovich”. With two minutes gone they were singing “We’ve won it all”, greeted by chants of “You’ve lost it all” from the Norwich fans. With three minutes gone they were 1-0 up, Trevoh Chalobah heading in Mason Mount’s corner. Say what you like about the oligarchical system of Vladimir Putin’s Russia: it has helped create a very effective football team.
With 14 minutes gone Mount made it 2-0, teed up by Havertz who looked, as he has done lately, a whirl of ceaseless movement and sharp edges close to goal. And as the game drifted on there was time to reflect on one of the strangest days in English football history, the day the most successful Premier League cub of the past two decades became, at a stroke, a distressed asset.
There are two points worth making about all this. First, the government’s decision to sanction seven Russian oligarchs has little to do with Chelsea. What is or isn’t fair for football fans makes up a tiny portion of this picture. Unrecoverable hotel costs? Northing to do on Saturday? Tell it to the besieged civilians of Ukraine.
And secondly, Chelsea are, for the time being, absolutely cooked. The club can’t generate income, can’t manage the payroll, can’t sell any tickets (those stacks of unsold Chelsea tickets have now become non-fungible tokens, to be traded for curiosity value, like a stopped watch from the deck of the Titanic).
The players were getting on a plane at Gatwick when news broke that this entity, this endlessly giving hand, had been chopped off at the knees by the British government. How many calls had been made by lunchtime to Reece James’s agent? How will Chelsea’s players make that £20,000 away day allowance stretch after this final Norfolk blow-out? Get the room service. Dismantle the trouser press. For tomorrow we’re in the serviced apart-hotels. There is at least something brilliantly prescient about Chelsea’s choice of Liquidator as the pre-match music at Stamford Bridge.
And really the key point here is the sheer suddenness. Really? Has the government only now discerned that Chelsea’s owner of the past 19 years is, in its own words, “connected” to Vladimir Putin? Had this not triggered any alarms? Did nobody have a word with the Premier League? Abramovich has not suddenly declared his fealty to his sovereign lord. He remains the same oddly mute, oddly sphinx-like presence. Plus of course right now there is nothing to stop it happening again. Finance a war criminal. It’s all good. Welcome to the greatest league in the world.
It has to be said, Chelsea’s players were undaunted, unscrambled, and hungrily engaged with the task in hand. It wouldn’t be a total surprise, would it, to see them go on and win the Champions League again under this cloud, to hear Roman’s name sung down the Champs-Élysées. Would that feel good? Does it still feel glorious?
Nobody in the away end here seemed to mind, even if Chelsea were made to hold on as Norwich pushed hard after pulling one back though Teemu Pukki’s penalty. Havertz’s late third killed the game. And Chelsea, for now, roll on.
