Mourinho driven out but Chelsea march on towards European glory
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Your support makes all the difference.Jose Mourinho was forced to leave Munich's Olympiastadion before kick-off last night but his Chelsea team reached the semi-finals of the Champions' League despite going down 3-2 to Bayern Munich who won with two late goals.
Jose Mourinho was forced to leave Munich's Olympiastadion before kick-off last night but his Chelsea team reached the semi-finals of the Champions' League despite going down 3-2 to Bayern Munich who won with two late goals.
A Chelsea spokesman said the Portuguese coach, who was banned from the touchline by Uefa, had intended to watch the match from the stadium's VIP area but found himself harassed by cameramen and left the ground minutes before kick-off in a taxi.
The incident, which Mourinho blamed on Uefa and could re-ignite his feud with the governing body, was beamed on to the big screen in the stadium and meant that the game began under the shadow of yet another controversy.
However, from then on, it was Mourinho's Chelsea team who took centre-stage with a 6-5 aggregate victory that earned them a semi-final place for the second successive year and they will play against either Liverpool or Juventus, who face each other in Turin tonight.
Chelsea looked almost certain to win last night's match after goals from Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba gave them a 2-1 lead with 11 minutes to play. However Bayern, who had equalised earlier through Claudio Pizarro then went on to win the game with goals from Paolo Guerrero and Mehmet Scholl in injury-time.
In a further twist, Chelsea also put out a statement denying they were interested in signing Manchester United's Rio Ferdinand in a bid to pre-empt another tapping-up scandal. It was a statement to pre-empt newspaper stories that Peter Kenyon met with the England international at a restaurant in London to discuss a possible move.
Next week, Chelsea will face the Premier League independent commission over allegations that they made an illegal approach to the Arsenal defender Ashley Cole in January. But that did not overshadow one of the most accomplished performances of Mourinho's reign in the last Champions' League match at the Olympiastadion.
However, Chelsea have a fitness scare over captain John Terry, who admitted that his leg was "in bits" after the match.
Lampard said: "We are not looking at the treble because when you are at this stage of the season you only look at the next game. We are only two wins away from the title and the priority is to win those two before the Champions' League."
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