CHELSEA FC

GILES SMITH: HERE COME THE BELGIANS

Posted on: Thu 02 Feb 2012

Two more games played and two more players signed in the last week. Giles Smith goes looking for trends and patterns and new culinary directions in this week's column…

We wrote in this spot last week - not entirely seriously - about Chelsea being the form team of 2012, not having lost a game this year, a distinction to which the teams around us, and even the three better placed ones, can lay no claim.
Since when two more games have gone by without defeat and I'm beginning to wonder whether there might be more substance to this theory than I knew.
Let's face it, the only consistent factor in this bafflingly random season is the inconsistency. Manchester City, who seemed awesome and inexorable a couple of months ago, have now contrived to lose to Everton. (They lost to us, too, let's not forget.) Manchester United, whom we play on Sunday, have managed to lose at home to Blackburn in the quite recent past, this week only beat Stoke on penalties, as it were, and basically look like they could lose to anyone at any point. And both those Manchester teams, following various unaccountable mishaps, are now, unlike some of us, down to their last viable knock-out cup competition, assuming we count the Europa League, which is a point for debate.
Meanwhile, Tottenham have found themselves going floppy as soon as anyone that they really need to beat comes along. And though Liverpool's unlikely advance to the Carling Cup final at the expense of Manchester City was said by one correspondent to indicate how Kenny Dalglish had 'restored traditional values' to the club, that wasn't something people were much talking about a couple of weeks ago when they were capitulating feebly at home to Bolton. (Nor during the Suarez affair, coming to think of it.)
As for Arsenal, recovering from 0-2 down at home to Aston Villa in the Cup would allegedly provide the boost they needed finally to start to put together a more coherent challenge for the top four - a renaissance, however, which did not extend to beating Bolton last night.
Leaving us, then, trudging along in a fairly undistinguished way (it must be admitted), getting the odd player sent off, relying on the odd streaky deflected shot in the fourth minute of time added on, but nevertheless getting the job (sort of) done. Not every team, after all, finds a point easy to come by at Swansea. Ask Arsenal.
At this rate, winning all your home games and drawing all your aways could just about constitute a title challenge. AVB could be right. It may not yet be over.

Is Chelsea the new Belgium? Recent signings tend to suggest a drift that way. There's Romelu Lukaku, already on the bench, and Thibaut Courtois, potentially the successor to Petr Cech and currently on loan to Atletico Madrid. And now there's Kevin De Bruyne, finally secured, after a long build-up, near the closing of the January transfer window, but not due to arrive, it seems, much before the season after next, in a slightly counter-intuitive 'pay now, take home later' arrangement. This, one can hardly help noticing, is the very opposite of the kind of deals they try to tempt you with at, for example, Curry's, where it's very much about taking home now and paying nothing until next year. But I'm sure people here know what they're doing. Anyway, the point is one can now reasonably envisage a time, three or four years or so hence, when more than a quarter of our team will be Belgian. Which will be great because, apart from anything else, when people ask that tiresome old question about how many famous Belgians you can name, we'll be in a position to tick off three straight away. And without recourse to mentioning Hercule Poirot at any point. But what would also be good is if our new, enhanced Belgian-ness eventually gave rise to a broader interest, around the club, in things Belgian. I'm thinking specifically of the noble Belgian tradition of serving chips with a huge and compulsory topping of mayonnaise - a sensational pre-match snacking notion, as any of us will happily confirm who have travelled in that country, or who, indeed, attended our Champions League match at Genk only last autumn. I renewed an historic acquaintance with this king among van-served dining opportunities on that very occasion, directly outside the ground, where the mayonnaise was supplied in such generous quantities that I actually managed to get a fair amount on my shoe, where traces of it are still dimly discernible, fully three months later. True, roughly 20 minutes after consuming what food writers would doubtless describe as a unique clash of the rich, buttery mayonnaise with the salty, deep-fried harshness of the potato, one's enthusiasm for the concept can be known to wane. But that's something that would be defeated, no doubt, with the practice that would come from greater exposure to the dish. And why not here, as the start of what could a whole new, Belgian-era drive towards a greater cosmopolitanism in the food kiosks around the Bridge?