Chapter Ninety-Six: Chelsea
Successfully entering the final, Bobovic will take a day off to give everyone a rest, and three days later will be the final of the Club World Cup.
This time, Tokyo FC did not return to Tokyo, so they stayed in Yokohama to train and wait for the finals, and by the way, they borrowed the training ground of Yokohama's local team, Yokohama FC.
Yokohama Mariner's training ground has long been loaned to Chelsea, and Tokyo FC can't count on it.
That night, Ringer snuck into a hotel in Yokohama, where the young lady was staying. Aragaki seems to be going to participate in an event and stay at this hotel, and go to watch the Club World Cup final in two days.
To be honest, the two haven't seen each other since the AFC awards ceremony, and Ringer still misses it a little.
The two of them had to be angry with firewood, and they had to linger and be compassionate.
But Ringer can only stop in moderation, and one visit is enough. The finals are coming soon, and when the time comes, it will become the final soft-footed shrimp, but it will be a shame.
The next day, Ringer waited for the young lady to leave first, and slept until noon before sneaking out.
Unexpectedly, when I got out of the hotel, there was still no Japanese entertainment reporter to catch me, but fortunately I was not with the young lady, so Ringer replied: "Yes, I came here to find Gakki." I just came here and haven't seen her yet~~~"
"I was courting her and invited him to watch the Club World Cup final for two days."
Ringer thought it would be better to move the topic to this end, otherwise the reporters would be pestering them all the time.
So Ringer is pursuing the entertainment news of Miss Aragaki officially released.
Back on the team, Bobovic soon called a kick-off meeting to cheer the whole team up.
Although he reached the final, the opponent in the final was the Champions League champion team, and there was an important striker on his side who was banned, Ringer knew that the whole team was pessimistic about this final, basically holding the idea that it would be a huge honor to win with less loss and reach the final.
Ringer had a conversation with Bobovich in the stands yesterday, and now Bobovich is going to step up and cheer him on.
'We reached the final against last season's Champions League winners Chelsea and a lot of people felt we had achieved our goal and deserved to lose to the big European clubs.
"But I want to tell you that there is no such thing as a deserved loss in this world, this Chelsea team has obvious problems and we can take the opportunity to beat each other~~~"
This Chelsea team does have a huge problem, starting with an ageing player.
Speaking of which, many of the current Chelsea players are still old players from the original Jose Mourinho coaching period, but Mourinho has been gone for five years, and Chelsea has changed seven managers, and the Chelsea team is still dominated by the original group of players, Terry, Lampard, Drogba, Cech, Ashley Cole, Malouda, Ferreira.
During Jose Mourinho's time, Chelsea were the favourites to win the Champions League every year, but they never won the Champions League.
In the last two years, Chelsea have become an old boy group and are no longer favourites in the Champions League, but last season they unexpectedly won the Champions League title they had been looking for for years.
In the 11/12 season, Villas-Boas, known as the "little madman", became the new head coach of Chelsea, but he had the whimsical idea to play fast-paced football with a group of veterans, which soon caused the team to complain.
As a result, Chelsea lost points in the league one after another, and the Champions League group stage also relied on a home win in the last round to qualify at the last moment, in this situation, the Champions League round of 16 faced Napoli in Serie A, Chelsea lost 1:3 away and was forced to the edge of elimination.
In this case, Villas-Boas was sacked and assistant coach Roberto Di Matteo took over on an interim basis.
Di Matteo returned to his previous style of play, and the team quickly regained great energy, returning to the Champions League round of 16 at home to successfully turn around 4:1 to enter the quarterfinals, and the Italian was also able to become a regular manager from interim manager.
Chelsea easily passed the Champions League quarterfinals against an easy-to-deal Benfica, but in the semi-finals, they met their old enemies, Barcelona, known as the Cosmos.
Barcelona from '09 to '12 was definitely a real cosmic team, and if they were lucky, they even had a chance to complete the Champions League four times in a row.
Encountering such a strong opponent, many people thought that Chelsea was finished, and could only be reduced to the backdrop of the Cosmos team defending the Champions League.
However, Chelsea held on to the first leg of the semi-final and beat the Cosmos 1-0 thanks to Didier Drogba's goal. In the second leg, he went to Camp Nou, and before the end of the first half, he was already 0-2 down, and the captain of the defensive pillar team, John Terry, was also sent off with a red card. In desperation, Chelsea launched a desperate counter-attack, pulling back two goals in quick succession, plus Messi missed a penalty, and Chelsea drew 2-2 away from Barcelona and eliminated the Cosmos 3-2 on aggregate to reach the Champions League final.
Chelsea's opponents in the Champions League final were also difficult to deal with, with Bayern Munich, who are gradually recovering their form, and the final venue was Bayern's home stadium, the Allianz Arena.
Playing away from home, with four of his main players missing, no one is optimistic about Chelsea winning the title.
In the final, Chelsea were completely on the back foot, with a group of veterans holding on for 83 minutes before Bayern Munich breached the back of the net, but Chelsea did not let this break and quickly equalised five minutes later, followed by the bus defence, and in extra-time Cech saved a penalty from Arjen Robben to finally hold on to the penalty shoot-out.
Cech was brave in the shoot-out, judging all five of his five penalties and saving two of them to help Chelsea beat Bayern Munich 4-3 to win their first ever Champions League title.
Chelsea's magical Champions League journey last season was unbelievable, but they seemed to be completely satisfied with winning the Champions League, like a deflated balloon.
Since the start of the season, they have lost 3-2 to Manchester City in the Community Shield and then suffered a 4-1 defeat to Europa League winners Atletico Madrid in the UEFA Super Cup.
Chelsea are also in poor form in the league, but even worse are the Champions League. As the defending champions, they were eliminated in the group stage of the Champions League, becoming the first defending champions in the history of the Champions League to go out of the group stage.
Naturally, Di Matteo stepped down and former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez took over Chelsea and is now leading the team to the Club World Cup.
Now Chelsea is, the core veterans have finally won the Champions League, they are satisfied, the pursuit of honor is no longer strong, and they are at odds with the manager.
Benitez, known as a master tactician, was the one who led Liverpool to do something like the Istanbul miracle. The ability is there, but his personality is flawed, and he likes to be more serious in everything, which is probably a big reason why he has run into walls everywhere after leaving Liverpool.
What's more, Benitez had a lot of grudges with Chelsea in his early years in charge of Liverpool.
Jose Mourinho led Chelsea to a big win in the Premier League, but they suffered when they met Benitez, especially in the Champions League.
Jose Mourinho was in charge of Chelsea for three full seasons at the beginning, and the failure to win the Champions League was the main reason for his dismissal. However, as the favourites to win the championship for three consecutive years but failed to win the Champions League, Benitez and Liverpool can be said to have contributed greatly.
In the 04/05 season, Jose Mourinho's first season in charge of Chelsea, saw the Blues go on a high league run and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League before meeting Liverpool. Chelsea were held to a 0-0 draw at home by Liverpool before being eliminated 1-0 at Anfield by a goal-line hangover.
Liverpool striker Luis Garcia's shot was cleared off the goal line, and the referee whistled for a valid goal, but whether the ball crossed the goal line is uncertain even today. At that time, there was no goal-line technology at all, even the broadcast technology was not up to par, and it was difficult to confirm whether the goal had been scored through non-stop replays after the game, but the referee thought the ball had scored, so Mourinho said after the game: The best team is out because the ghost scored.
This is the story of the ghost's goal to knock out Jose Mourinho.
In the 05/06 season, Chelsea met Liverpool in the group stage of the Champions League, which was the only time in the history of the Champions League that they met a league team in the group stage.
The reason why such a strange thing happened is that I have to talk about the Champions League format on UEFA's side.
The rules of the Champions League system, the number of Champions League places in each European league each season have been set for a long time, and at the same time, the defending champions must participate in the Champions League next season. Generally speaking, the team that can win the Champions League must be strong, and of course they can also qualify for the Champions League in their own league, so UEFA has never considered the situation where there will be teams that win the Champions League but do not qualify for the Champions League with poor results in the domestic league.
In fact, this has happened before, in the 99/00 season, Real Madrid won the Champions League, but only finished fifth in La Liga, and failed to qualify for next season's Champions League. At that time, UEFA asked La Liga to adjust internally, in short, to let the defending champions appear in the Champions League next season.
So La Liga adjusted internally, and Zaragoza, who finished fourth in the league, gave up their place to Real Madrid, covering up the problem of the unreasonable UEFA system, and the UEFA bureaucrats did not supplement the competition system, so that the loophole has been maintained.
This happened again in the 04/05 season, when Liverpool won the Champions League and finished fifth in the league. UEFA has repeated its old tricks and made the Premier League adjust internally.
This time it can't be adjusted, because if someone wants to give up Champions League qualification, of course, it can only be the fourth team in the league, but who is fourth in the Premier League this season?
Everton, Liverpool's sworn rivals, how could they give up their Champions League places to their rivals. Everton are adamant not to do it, UEFA's approach is not working.
What can I do? The defending champions can't be absent from next season's Champions League, and in the end UEFA came up with an unrelenting solution, giving Liverpool a special place to play in the first round of Champions League qualifying. Letting Liverpool play all the way to the qualifying round can be regarded as avoiding the absence of the defending champions.
Since it is a special quota, UEFA has also clarified that if Liverpool reaches the group stage, it will not apply to the Champions League's group stage and league avoidance principle.
As a result, Liverpool and Chelsea were placed in a group, and in the end, Liverpool managed to squeeze Chelsea into second place in the group, and then Chelsea met Barcelona in the other group in the round of 16 draw, and were finally eliminated by Ronaldo's Barcelona. In the Champions League that year, Barcelona was the final champion.
Of course, there is a follow-up to this. With that mistake, UEFA finally realised the importance of the issue and added to the Champions League format, so that if a similar situation happens in the future, the fourth-placed team in the league will automatically cede qualification to the defending champions.
The first beneficiary of this addendum is Chelsea this season, who won the Champions League last season but finished sixth in the league, so Tottenham Hotspur, who finished fourth in the Premier League last season, were stripped of Champions League qualification and Chelsea rose to the top.
However, Chelsea, who won the Champions League place, was eliminated in the group stage, and it was better not to participate.
And Everton, who was disobedient and didn't know how to "take care of the overall situation", was also put in small shoes by UEFA.
Everton: Aren't you here to play in the Champions League? But you're fourth in the Premier League, so you have to play a qualifying round. Okay, I'm going to have a good opponent for you. As a result, Everton drew La Liga's Villarreal in the Champions League qualifying round, and was eliminated by the Yellow Submarine 4:2, and the Champions League addiction for decades ended in one qualifying round.
In the 06/07 season, Jose Mourinho's third season in charge of Chelsea, Chelsea once again reached the semi-finals and met the big boss Liverpool. This time Chelsea beat Liverpool 1-0 at home, but in the second leg it went to Anfield, where Liverpool's Danish defender Ager equalised with a shocking long-range shot, and finally had to fight for a penalty shoot-out, and Liverpool eliminated Chelsea again.
For three consecutive years, Chelsea was directly or indirectly eliminated from the Champions League by Liverpool, and the Liverpool manager at that time was the tactician Benitez.
Now that Master Pei has unexpectedly taken over the position of Chelsea temporarily, Master Pei himself is not very good at handling interpersonal relationships, so the team must not be very friendly to him.
In previous rounds of Premier League matches, there have been fans at Stamford Bridge who have been waving "Rafa Out" signs, which is telling him (Rafa Benitez) to get out.
So Chelsea is like this now, the veterans who have the most voice in the interior are already satisfied with winning the Champions League, and they are not very willing to work hard, and at the same time, the coach is not in harmony, and Benitez is a bit of a hollow.
Taken together, these are the chances for FC Tokyo to beat Chelsea.