Give me potty Didier Drogba over beautiful Fernando Torres

Matthew Norman
05.10.09

At the end of another weekend in which goals festooned the Premier League like leaves falling on to an autumnal lawn, it fell to Chelsea and Liverpool to remind us that football tends, by and large, towards the prosaic.

You wouldn't know that from the outlandish torrent of early season goals and it's the seven-year-olds I feel sorry for. Imagine being newly hooked on the game and conned by the recent glut of outlandish scorelines into a lifetime of anti-climax.

What followed Arsenal's 6-2 demolition of Blackburn yesterday on Sky was, to borrow a phrase well on the road to fully fledged football clichedom, a reality check.

This Big Four clash at Stamford Bridge was precisely what grizzled armchair veterans like me anticipate from our Sunday afternoon fare . . . long stretches of earnest effort between two tightly compressed midfields, leavened by occasional mistakes at the back and even scarcer moments of inspiration up front.

The pre-game hype had centred on the battle for supremacy between Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres, but forced to pick between them after 20 incalculably tedious minutes you'd have fallen back on Alan Bennett's response when asked if he was straight or gay: that it was like enquiring of a man dying of thirst in the Sahara whether he'd prefer Evian or Perrier.

At that stage, you'd have thirstily swallowed anything of quality either of them offered.

By the final whistle, however, Torres had done little but waste a pair of facile chances while Drogba had illustrated why, despite his vastly inferior scoring record, choosing between these two feared strikers is a much tougher call than the bare statistics suggest.

The Ivorian hyper-narcissist's performance was a perfect summation of his career. For periods he seemed uninterested, every so often collapsing to the turf clutching his head or doing the get-the-physio-on-NOW hand-whirring gesture for no apparent reason, until eventually his captain could stand it no more.

John Terry lolloped over, arms outstretched, to deliver the maternal "Come on, love, up you get" speech that is becoming a routine and hauled him to his feet.

So instantly did Drogba recover that, were JT a boozer on the scale of that old Blues centre forward Tommy Baldwin, his nickname would surely be The Magic Sponge.

So much for the ritualistic play-acting and on to the glorious side to Drogba's game. Like Torres, he was almost completely shackled by the opposing centre-backs. Unlike the Spanish pretty boy he did something about it, recasting himself as an emergency winger to devastating effect. Two moments of brilliance on either flank decided a rank match that strictly deserved to end in scoreless indecision.

The first assist, if you'll forgive the Americanism, followed the first properly clinical counter-attack contrived by a Chelsea side possibly too content to play on the break Released on the left, he delivered an exquisite low cross that tempted Pepe Reina into a futile dash from his goal and invited Nicolas Anelka to shin the ball into the unguarded net.

Where that was an expression of finesse, the second goal he made, in added time, showcased his strength as he brushed off challenges like a Titan swatting away hornets before pulling the ball back for Florent Malouda to bundle it in.

That Drogba was entirely the difference between two teams long on organisation and short on guile is all that need be said. Frank Lampard ran a lot but achieved little of note, much like Steven Gerrard, while Deco confirmed that he lacks the physical presence to be more than a cameo player in this league.

The return of Joe Cole cannot come soon enough for Chelsea. Liverpool, meanwhile, sorely miss the variety of passing that went with Xabi Alonso and will not be mounting a title challenge. Chelsea, restored to the head of the table, assuredly will. After poor displays at Wigan and in Cyprus in the Champions League, they still looked short of their best.

But they possess something crucial that neither Manchester United nor Arsenal currently appear to share and that's the ability to nurdle three points from performances that barely merit one.

Part of that is self-belief, part a generally reliable central defence, and part, too, perhaps the drive and ambition of a side stuffed with over-30s who know that the time for trophies is short. Much of it, though, is down to Drogba, a slightly potty, often enraging presence with the rare talent for a striker of being able to control the tempo of matches, and the knack for turning them with a flash of virtuosity just when he looks so inert that you're tempted to strap him to a heart monitor and inject him with adrenaline.

Torres is a magnificent scorer of beautiful goals, and would justly be the first name on many people's fantasy football team sheet. But fantasy football was in short supply yesterday and in the dull real world I'd plump for Drogba over him every time.