Kai Havertz sparkles against Norwich but Chelsea’s uneasy reality is laid bare

Freeze our assets. Curtail our hotel allowance. Link our 19 years of unbroken success to the enabling of a blood-stained dictator. It seems the show really does go on. For now anyway, as on a crisp, clear Norfolk evening the players of Chelsea dished up an entertaining Premier League defeat of a game and energetic Norwich.

Welcome to Chelsea, the afterlife. A place that felt, as the Norwich fans sang about dirty Russian money, as the Chelsea fans serenaded their yacht-bound owner, like another lurch into the deeply strange parallel timeline of football and geopolitics in the year 2022.

News of the sanctions imposed on Roman Abramovich had emerged shortly after 9am on Thursdayyesterday morning. By lunchtime the canal-side boulevards of Norwich’s pedestrianised city centre were thronged with Chelsea supporters singing the afternoon away. “We’ve got Tommy Tuchel: he knows just what to do.” Does he though? And if so, could he share it with the rest of us? Because nothing right now makes a great deal of sense.

Later on, as the Chelsea fans kept up an early wave of noise close to kick off there was a valedictory, Viking funeral-style air about their boisterous good spirits, a sense of good cheer, of event-glamour about all this. Humans are odd creatures. Give us a tribe, a hill to die on: any hill, and often that’s enough.

It would be convention at this point to state that this was a game Chelsea needed to win to maintain their stroll towards next season’s Champions League and another step into the unblemished future. Although right now all of this must come asterisked with uncertainty and hypothesis.

Tuchel had picked an everyday Chelsea team for this most otherworldly of occasions, rotating some key parts but retaining the