Smiley Riley gives Chelsea rhyme and reason for despair

Matthew Norman
2 Feb 2009

At half-time in the Sky Sports box at Anfield, the mood was sombre. It very seldom is. Usually at such a moment, our genial anchor Richard Keys gleefully informs us we've been blessed by the previous 45 minutes and will be transported to paradise by those yet to come.

Not this time. Yesterday, Richard was surprisingly subdued by a first half which Ruud Gullit interpreted as a personal affront.

And with good reason. It had been not been sexy football. It had barely been bromide football. It had been chemical castration football of such rampant tedium that a tape should be sent to sex educationalists in every school with above average rates of teenage pregnancy.

What was in the mind of Phil Scolari when he sent Chelsea out to draw 0-0 and further dissipate his dwindling title prospects I struggle to conceive. But never can there have been a less ambitious effort in a Big-Four clash.

Liverpool were wretched themselves, admittedly, in their witless lack of invention. Not so wretched that the watching Robbie Keane should relish a rumoured return to Spurs (they're all coming home, where's Alan Gilzean?), but enough that all their best first-half efforts were down to Chelsea players' mistakes - Petr Cech's elaborate dribble and Ashley Cole's misdirected header towards his own goal.

But Liverpool at least seemed minded to score, whereas Chelsea's only hope of victory was to make an emergency application for this to become football's answer to the Timeless Test, and then pray that Liverpool players died of natural causes faster than their own.

All of which is a long winded way of saying thank heaven for Mike Riley, who barely stopped smiling throughout.

His dismissal of Frank Lampard for a perfectly fair tackle, albeit his studs inadvertently caught Xabi Alonso, was a shocker even by his own reliably idiotic standards, and provided what little redemptive flavour the second half had.

The game's tempo soared from comatose to dozy, and the slight decrease in midfield congestion eventually contributed to the first of Fernando Torres's brace of late goals (largely due, for all his clever run, to cataclysmic positioning by Cech). Liverpool may barely have deserved to win this game but, by God, Chelsea had earned the right to lose it.

In between the goals, Old Mother Riley found time to unleash a decision of such monumental foolishness that the first howler seemed worthy of the great Pierluigi Collina.

After Jose Bosingwa artlessly kicked Yossi Benayoun in the back 18 inches from the watching linesman, he waved away the flag in the imperious style of one with weightier matters on his mind than applying the laws of football.

Bless him for giving this turgid encounter two talking points, but this was a still a poor return for time none of us will recover, and you marvelled anew at the team from Sky and their limitless capacity to find pleasure in purgatory.

"It's very late, but it's really great," commentator Martin Tyler excitably rhymed as Torres slotted home the needless insurance, cunningly reminding us that the post of Poet Laureate is, to borrow from Brian Moore, up for grabs now. On an afternoon when Riley was highly smiley yet twice cocked up vilely, a couple of hours closeted with the Complete Works of Pam Ayres would have been comparative bliss.