Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney show becomes secondary to classic Chelsea v Manchester United duel
Contrary to the melodramatic protestations of Sir Alex Ferguson and Carlo Ancelotti, nobody appeared to be in the mood to either kill Ashley Cole or electrocute Wayne Rooney at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday night.
In the line of fire: Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney (right) were under the spotlight at Stamford Bridge following their latest transgressions Photo: PA
By Ian Chadband 11:28PM GMT 01 Mar 2011
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It may have been billed as the bad boys’ battle at the Bridge but the entire match turned out to be so dizzyingly breathless and compelling that the duel of the miscreants thankfully became swept up as a merely intriguing sub-plot amid quite epic fare.
Rather, plenty of pantomime jeering and the oh so predictable cries of “shooooot!” whenever Cole received the ball within about 70 yards of the Manchester United goal seemed to be the order of the night as if nobody here was about to take this tale of two foolish boys overly seriously.
Anyway, when it comes to sinning, memories are of goldfish-length in the Premier League as long as there’s enough star quality about.
By the end of a pulsating evening, the attention had turned to other individuals. The home faithful were not talking about Cole but of the splendid derring-do of their new instant frizzy haired icon, David Luiz. Heck, this lad is going to be a star at the Bridge.
Doubtless Gary Neville, now a face in the crowd, was left raging about another Vidic sending off, while others will have joined Fergie’s rant about referee Martin Atkinson and a soft penalty.
Yet, mainly, everyone was left reflecting on a quite thunderous game played at a breakneck pace which may have given Chelsea the faintest dream of retaining their title. And, yes, our two misfiring heroes played a vibrant part.
Naturally, it had all begun with 40,000-odd marvelling why either were there at all. In a saner world, Cole would have been made an example of by his club and been left reflecting on his utter idiocy at mucking around with firearms, while Rooney would have been serving a suspension for unashamedly using his elbow as an offensive weapon.
Instead, they were out there large as life, one spared by Chelsea’s spinelessness in responding to an act which would have caused instant dismissal in right-thinking workplaces and the other by Mark Clattenburg’s feebleness in not acknowledging a blatant mistake.
And the common theme? Both were both protected by their own vast celebrity.
Still, they seemed wholly unaffected by the constant ridicule out there. Rooney was lively, his goal a thing of beauty, while Cole foraged forward to his heart’s content once he realised he was going to be faced by Darren Fletcher rather than Nani.
There are those who will swear blind after this weekend that the pair must be thick; that may be totally unfair but their thickest of skins could not be in dispute.
For a large part of the night, it looked as if there would only be one winner in this tale within a saga, with Rooney making the Chelsea faithful curse Clattenburg.
His performance was a little hit and miss but still one of his better efforts of a see-saw season.
And when he was offered preposterous amounts of time and space by Ivanovic and co, he launched a bullet which, naturally, the jokers reckoned Cole would have been proud of firing.
Ferguson thinks there is a witch-hunt against Rooney, that we want to pounce gleefully on every misdemeanour or moment of indiscipline.
Nonsense: more precisely, those who chronicle the finest English talent of his generation long to see Rooney back to the unstoppable force of late 2009 and early 2010 before he got clouted on the ankle against Bayern Munich.
Football wants and needs a transcendent Rooney, not a transgressing Rooney and at least we were treated, gladly, to more of the former than the latter as he powered through from deep, instrumental in counter-attacks of speed and precision.
OK, so there was one of his ‘I’m going to start a war in an empty room’ moments when he immediately roared to his feet after losing the ball and barged straight into Ramires, sending him sprawling. It was reminiscent of his little moment of red mist retaliation on Saturday.
And he also missed a sitter when Nani’s cross found him unmarked in the box and his header skewed off his bonce so embarrassingly that it seemed to sum up the worst aspects of his season. Yet within minutes he had hit the target unerringly.
As for Cole? Well, much to the glee of the United supporters behind the goal, he did answer their cry of “shoooot!” once with one which sailed high, wide and not very handsome.
Still, the poorer marksman had the last laugh.
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