The temptation is always to make excuses for Chelsea. They have a young and inexperienced side. They have lots of injuries. They’ve accidentally appointed a smart young entrepreneur as head coach. They actually played pretty well for part of the first leg. And then you remember they’ve spent £1.5bn to get to this point – and that from a position of strength an inquiry has concluded they achieved by illicit means.
The Premier League may have been lenient in its judgment, but pundits should not be. Chelsea were outclassed to an embarrassing degree. It was never going to be easy to overturn a 5-2 first-leg deficit, but 8-2 on aggregate is a humiliation. It wasn’t just the margin of victory, though; it was the sense that, after going 2-0 up inside 15 minutes, Paris Saint-Germain could essentially have scored whenever they felt like it. This was a Chelsea performance devoid not only of spark but of structure.
