So often, over the years at Stamford Bridge, the whole has added up to very much less than the sum of the glittering parts. Underachievement is a way of life at Chelsea, but seldom can it have been made as explicit as it was on Saturday, when a team of expensive stars gave a thoroughly discreditable performance in a vital fixture at the sharp end of the season.
Claudio Ranieri had opened his programme notes with a simple declaration. "Everybody knows the Champions League is our most important aim," he wrote. "Today's game is the most important one." More important, that is to say, than the meeting with Arsenal in the FA Cup final a week on Saturday. His players' response suggested that the implications of failure to qualify for Europe's major club competition had passed them by.
Afterwards he was almost speechless. "We didn't play today," he managed to say. "I don't know why." Someone pointed out that his players had just not seemed to be in the mood. "Yes, I was curious to see that," he said. "And in front of them was Manchester United. I don't understand this."
A minute or so later, one of his players made an admission that might be helpful to his analysis of the failure. "I couldn't wait for the final whistle, to be honest," John Terry said. Frankness is all very well, but Terry's words betrayed the unwillingness of some of his colleagues to perform as though no match is dead and buried until the players are actually exchanging shirts.
Even if most of them managed to give the impression that their priorities lay elsewhere, a performance like this must first of all force the manager to take a good look at himself. He picks the team and gives them their instructions. When their failure is so total, so dismal, there is no point in blaming individual players.
In his 15 years at Old Trafford, Alex Ferguson can never have witnessed a Manchester United side capitulating as abjectly as their opponents did on Saturday. In front of their own fans, Chelsea ran up the white flag long before half-time, allowing a bunch of genuine championship contenders to do more or less as they wished with the rest of the afternoon.
Given the weakening of the FA Cup's hold on the imagination of players and public in recent years, it seems unlikely that Chelsea were saving themselves for the final. The World Cup is a different matter, and its imperatives may have been preying on the mind of Emmanuel Petit, whose partnership with Frank Lampard in central midfield was so comprehensively overshadowed by that of Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt.
Partners for more than a decade, Scholes and Butt stayed mostly within a few yards of each other, using patience and deftness to neutralise Chelsea's attempts to take the initiative and ensuring that Roy Keane was never missed. Nor, thanks to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's diligence and subtlety, was David Beckham.
United started slowly and took a few minutes to get their machinery working smoothly. But after Scholes had accepted Gary Neville's square free-kick to smash a 25-yard shot past Carlo Cudicini in the 16th minute, with the aid of a deflection off Petit, they accelerated smoothly away.
Chelsea had discovered that their attempts to walk the ball into the United net would founder on the anticipation of Laurent Blanc and the solidity of Wes Brown, whose successful return after a long-term injury gave the watching Sven-Goran Eriksson something to think about besides the presence of Ulrika Jonsson.
Any chance of an early riposte to Scholes's strike was banished between the 20th and the 22nd minutes, when three members of Chelsea's defence - Terry, William Gallas and Marcel Desailly - each played clearances from the edge of their own area straight to members of the opposition, halting the entire team's momentum.
In their present form United hardly need such gifts and it was no surprise when they increased their lead three minutes before half-time, Ryan Giggs and Solskjaer combining to present Ruud van Nistelrooy with the opportunity to beat Carlo Cudicini from a narrow angle. Cudicini, the one Chelsea player to preserve his reputation, had already made one point-blank save from Van Nistelrooy, and was to repeat the feat after the interval, but on this occasion was helpless.
Faced with a two-goal deficit at half-time, Chelsea never looked like making a fight of it. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, all snarl and no bite, never got within range while Ranieri's decision to replace Eidur Gudjohnsen with Boudewijn Zenden for the second half did nothing to add purpose to Chelsea's tactics while removing one of the few possible sources of a goal.
United added a grace note five minutes from the end, Giggs and Van Nistelrooy exchanging passes on the left before the Welshman unselfishly squared the ball for Solskjaer to complete the scoring. But by that time Chelsea, a team without anything resembling a real leader when times get tough, had already given up.
· Bayer Leverkusen, who face Manchester United at Old Trafford on Wednesday in a Champions League semi-final, slipped up in their chase for a first German crown when they fell 2-1 at home to Werder Bremen on Saturday. Leverkusen would have wrapped it up if they had won and Dortmund had not beaten Cologne.
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