by Guest Thu Aug 24, 2006 7:15 pm
At the Nou Camp last March, Jose Mourinho received the most humbling football lesson of his managerial career to date. Now he has the chance to show how much he learned: Chelsea have been drawn against Barcelona in the Champions League for the third season in a row.
While the contests stand alone as something to savour, the additional presence of Werder Bremen in a high-class Group A mean that it is not inconceivable that one of the two sides could fall at the first hurdle. Levski Sofia should be easy meat, but Bremen are a dangerous side who include the World Cup's leading scorer Miroslav Klose, as well as his impressive team-mates Torsten Frings and Tim Borowski, and they were extremely unlucky not to beat Juventus in the first knockout round of last season's tournament.
Inevitably, however, most eyes will be on Chelsea's reunion with Barcelona. Though they only lost 3-2 on aggregate to Barca last season, the reality was that Chelsea were miles behind, humbled by a team whose movement and quality were on a different plane. They were outclassed and, for all his bleating about Barça's inability to beat Chelsea when they had 11 men, he knew it. Indeed, many believe it was the quietly emphatic nature of this defeat that prompted Mourinho to dabble in the galactico pool for the first time, buying Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko, and the matches with Barcelona will go some way to indicating the wisdom or otherwise of that policy.
For the neutral, too, they should be classic contests. The two clubs are a study in contrasts - fantasy against pragmatism, tradition against nouveau, Rijkaard against Mourinho - and the mutual animosity first evidenced when Chelsea bundled Barça out in 2004-05 make an already compelling prospect even more mouth-watering.
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I don't think it's a group of death in a football sense anyway. There's a banana skin or two in Man U's group. Group B looks toughest.
