Your name is Sonia Bompastor. Your Chelsea team are winning3-0 in the FA Cup finaland about to cap a 30-game unbeaten domestic season with a league, cup and league cup treble. Wembley is a sea of triumphant blue flags. Manchester United, shuffling and straggling around the pitch, look like the victims of some macabre reality television endurance challenge that will later be censured by Ofcom. What is your next move?
Well, if you’re Bompastor, your next move is to make a triple substitution in the 93rd minute. On come Guro Reiten, Sjoeke Nüsken, Johanna Rytting Kaneryd. Just in case. Just to see things out. Just the 198 international caps, 14 league titles and 26 major trophies, casually hauled off the bench in injury time of an already-won cup final. And for Chelsea this really was the most insouciant flex: the victory lap before the victory lap, the £50 tip you give the waiter just because you can.
The scoreline made it look comfortable for Chelsea in the end. Which to be fair it was, in the end. And also in the beginning, and the middle. And, to be fair, from the moment Aggie Beever-Jones headed in the winner against Liverpool five weeks ago. And certainly from the moment Serena Williams took her seat in the royal box alongside her Chelsea co-owning husband. No disrespect to Jason Wilcox – OK, alittledisrespect to Jason Wilcox – but it’s hard for United to compete with that calibre of A-list stardust.
Presumably Sir Jim Ratcliffe had a more pressing engagement preventing his attendance: something about acetyls would be my guess, or a really important meeting about a racing boat. By the same token you could scarcely blame the United co-owner for wanting to put some distance between himself and this certain ambush, the inevitability of an underfunded squad getting ripped apart by faster, better, morelovedathletes.
United did at least come with an eye-catchingly bespoke plan: Dominique Janssen in midfield ahead of Ella Toone, a security pact that also felt like something of a surrender. If Barcelona taught us anything useful inthat Champions League tie, it is that the way to get into Chelsea’s heads is to keep the ball, force them out of their patterns, make them wait and make them chase.
Instead, United tried to get in their grille. No frills in possession, plug the gaps, tackle hard, disturb Chelsea’s rhythm. It worked, a little, for a little while. Twice in the first 20 minutes Celin Bizet put Erin Cuthbert on her backside. Janssen locked down the spaces in front of the two centre-halves. At the other end Phallon Tullis-Joyce – impressive again – made two good reflex saves.
But as Chelsea settled, as they realised that United had no pace to hurt them, United were gradually pinned back. And trying to keep Chelsea out for two hours is a little like trying to evade a pack of lions while wearing a suit knitted entirely out of sirloin. Maya Le Tissier and Millie Turner needed to be perfect and were not; the next time Bizet took out Cuthbert it was a penalty; Sandy Baltimore converted the kick and from there the afternoon began to unravel in entirely familiar patterns.
This week an interview with the former US national team goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris went viral. “I choose to be exceptional every single day,” she said on one of those awful girl-boss podcasts. “I don’t fuck with average people. They make me uncomfortable. I don’t like to be in the same rooms, the same spaces.”
Bompastor is far too self-aware to express herself in similarly provocative terms. But there was just a hint of that energy in an interview she gave the Observer this week, in which she urged her domestic rivals to “catch up” if they were bored of Chelsea’s dominance. Which sounds simple enough. But in practice, what does catching up to Chelsea look like?
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It means: go and find your own Champions League-winning manager. Go and sign your own world record defender. Go and find your own multimillionaire tech baron. Find your own Williams sister. Find your own prime plot of west London real estate. And yes, this sounds flippant because it is flippant, but what is the realistic alternative? The time for meaningful cost controls has arguably already passed. The window for first-mover advantage has passed. Chelsea moved first. They got the advantage.
What United do have, of course, is Britain’s richest man, albeit one who appears more preoccupied with saving a few thousand pounds on staff Christmas parties than finding a spare couple of million for Linda Caicedo. How might United be transformed if Ratcliffe chose to be exceptional every single day? If he refused to fuck with average people? (And again, no disrespect to Jason Wilcox here.)
“Everybody thinks it’s easy,” Cuthbert complained at full-time, which isn’t quite true. Nobody thinks what Chelsea have done is easy. But itisgetting easier with time. In a way, it has been Chelsea’s curse to become so good, so efficient, so often, that they begin to erode the scale of their own achievement. Two things can be true at once. We should salute this Chelsea side. But also, we should pray someone gives them a game soon.