Blackburn Rovers 0 Chelsea 2: Mourinho searches for spark in midfield duplicates

Chelsea might still be fuelling the revived ambitions of Manchester United and Liverpool this morning had the long-delayed war against the scourge of penalty-area defensive-grappling not been given its most dramatic impetus so far.

The referee Mark Clattenburg's decision to penalise Blackburn's Andre Ooijer in the 50th minute when he wrapped his arms around John Terry would have been the plainest formality in a more enlightened football age, but in the scuffling wrestling zone of today's penalty area it still seemed like a bolt from the heavens - certainly for a Blackburn team who had been posing fresh question marks against Chelsea's ability to easily absorb the individual talent of Andrei Shevchenko and Michael Ballack.

The Blackburn manager Mark Hughes complained that Terry had dived - because he was aware he was being "closely marked" by Ooijer. That was a euphemism which perhaps goes to the heart of a problem which has persuaded some great old players that they can no longer bear to watch the unhindered spoiling of defenders who long ago abandoned the challenge of matching skill for skill. The fact was that Ooijer's close marking was the kind of thing you normally see in a sumo hall.

Frank Lampard, scarcely on nodding terms with Ballack for most of the afternoon, finally had the chance to make an impact and he did so from the spot.

It was a piece of natural justice, but for Jose Mourinho the symbolic moment of football reform was probably a remote after-thought.

The truth was that once again his team struggled to impose the authority that has brought two successive Premiership titles and suggested that a third was inevitable when the big money was being spent on two of the great names of European football. Perhaps bedding-down allowances need to be made; maybe Ballack and Shevchenko will soon find the rhythm that made them such titans on the Continent, but for the moment there is plainly much assimilating to be done.

Blackburn's Ooijer, a reliable performer for the Netherlands in the World Cup and a central defender who looked good value at £2m before his moment of lost nerve, was the agent who lifted the crisis which descended on the champions last week in Middlesbrough when he locked Terry in his grasp, and his failure to control the power of Didier Drogba nine minutes from the end finally lifted the pressure on a Mourinho for whom a second successive Premiership defeat would have carried him to new and treacherous ground.

Of course Chelsea have the deepest of resources and there was always the sense that Blackburn, themselves contemplating a sudden, disconcerting closing in of their own horizons with just one point from two games, would wear themselves out - especially in the matter of containing the power surges of Michael Essien. However, the general level of Chelsea's performance was particularly alarming on a weekend when their great rivals United maintained their 100 per cent start and Liverpool showed some flashes of genuine attacking invention in a repeat of the victory over their FA Cup final opponents, West Ham.

Chelsea's problem was the same as the one that afflicted them at Middlesbrough. It was a lack of balance, a sense that the individual midfield strength of such as Lampard, Ballack and Essien was draining away in the starkest case of duplication.

Shaun Wright-Phillips was eventually brought on for Shevchenko - a move which didn't spread too much instant light on Mourinho's thought process.

For Hughes there was additional angst when Clattenburg gave some painful evidence that his enthusiasm for a crackdown on wrestling and shirt-pulling might not have been as whole-hearted as he had indicated. Certainly there was a compelling case for a Blackburn penalty when Chelsea's Richardo Carvalho snatched at the shirt of Jason Roberts when he was running clear in the penalty area. Hughes insisted that it was a penalty. Mourinho, naturally, didn't see the incident.

It left two unavoidable conclusions. If the authorities are truly committed to cleaning up the penalty areas, to enforcing the laws as they were written not as they have evolved in a decade of official acquiescence, there has to be a new insistence on consistency. Chelsea, who needed all the help they could get as Robbie Savage played with a vigour that perhaps made his booking inevitable, got the benefit of the new official drive for reform. Blackburn didn't. Nor did they get much luck.

There were some impressive individual performances in the match, not least from Australia's World Cup star, Brett Emerton, who ran powerfully along the right flank, and the South African signing Benni McCarthy produced some moments of genuine skill and penetration.

However, the weight of Chelsea's game, the sheer competence of their manpower, eventually produced an inevitable result. Drogba produced some impressive power and his finishing stroke was something of a relief for Mourinho after Shevchenko's failure to make something out of the most negligible of service.

Mourinho was naturally dismissive of talk of a crisis. Chelsea had suffered the smallest of inconveniences and now they were back on course, a team of power driven by the vision of the "Special One".

It was a pretty, reassuring sentiment for the Chelsea fans who had spent most of the game in glum silence. But how many of them were truly convinced may be a cause for some reflection, not least by Roman Abramovich, the man who thought he was signing up to instant glamour. It was somewhat elusive in east Lancashire yesterday.

Goals: Lampard pen (50) 0-1; Drogba (81) 0-2.

Blackburn Rovers (4-4-2): Friedel; Emerton, Ooijer, Khizanishvili, Neill; Bentley, Savage, Reid, Pedersen (Gallagher, 69); McCarthy, Roberts. Substitutes not used: Brown (gk), Todd, Kuqi, Jeffers.

Chelsea (4-1-3-2): Cech; Boulahrouz, Terry, Carvalho, Bridge; Makelele (Obi Mikel, 89); Essien, Ballack, Lampard; Kalou (Drogba, 57), Shevchenko (Wright-Phillips, 84). Substitutes not used: Cudicini (gk), Ferreira.

Referee: M Clattenburg (Tyne and Wear).

Booked: Blackburn Savage, Ooijer, Khizanishvili; Chelsea Makelele.

Man of the match: Essien.

Attendance: 19,398.