Out of chaos comes trophies. It shouldn’t be so, but it’s been the Chelsea way for more than 20 years now: no matter how shambolic everything seems behind the scenes, no matter how many managers they burn through, no matter how scattergun the transfer policy, no matter how much discontent seeps from the dressing room, somehow they spend enough to keep on winning trophies.

Since Roman Abramovich took over the club in 2003, Chelsea have had 20 permanent managers (including two longish-term interims, and three who had two stints in charge) and won 20 trophies (Community Shields and Uefa Super Cups excluded). That is a bizarre statistic: almost a manager a season should not also be bringing in almost a trophy a season. Whether Calum McFarlane’s appointment to see them through to the end of the season after the sacking of Liam Rosenior last week is enough for him to be considered a 21st manager is debatable, but he now stands one game from adding a 21st trophy.

This was not a great performance from Chelsea; nobody will be sitting awestruck thinking McFarlane deserves the job full-time on the back of this. It wasn’t even really a good performance. It was disjointed and bitty in a game that never developed any sort of rhythm. But there was a fight and a resilience and less of a sense of disillusioned resignation, and that definitely represents a step in the right direction.

One thing hadn’t changed from what already feels like the inexplicable Rosenior interlude. Chelsea still huddled in the centre-circle before kick-off, although without using either the ball or a passing referee as a prop. A degree of self-destructiveness remained as well, and had Robert Sánchez not got his foot to Brenden Aaronson’s 15th-minute effort, all the talk would have been of the cheapness with which possession was squandered and Trevoh Chalobah’s weird misjudgment that yielded the chance.

But other things felt very different. There was a fine goalkeeping performance from Sánchez, his reflex save from Joe Rodon of particular note; Chelsea’s best days tend to come when he is having a good day, as he did in the Club World Cup final. But those days have never quite been consistent enough to convince at Chelsea, and less than stellar goalkeeping, not only from Sánchez, has been a feature of this season.

There was even, thrillingly, a goal, Chelsea’s first against Premier League opposition since they hammered Aston Villa on 4 March, nearly eight weeks ago in bald chronology but a lifetime in terms of the history of the club, the lifespan of a Chelsea manager being admittedly brief. And of course, given football’s habit of underlining narrative tropes, it came from Enzo Fernández, whose suspension after acknowledging he wouldn’t mind living in Madrid seemed to be what brought the recent crisis to a head, even if Rosenior probably wasn’t the one who wanted the ban.

There was also a real will to win that, disappointingly for the sport, manifested in cynicism. Chelsea are certainly not the only team guilty of this, but this was a semi-final to offer a reminder that, from a laws point of view, the biggest issue facing the game is timewasting. Ifab may fret about how long throw-ins take and how to define handball, but of far more concern should be how easy it is for teams to run down the clock by feigning injury. Crying wolf is not just morally reprehensible and deleterious to the spectacle, but risks serious injury in potentially reducing the urgency to treat a genuinely stricken player. The referee Jarred Gillett never showed the slightest sign of being able to handle Chelsea’s cynicism.

As they had lost five straight Premier League games, there had been a theory that Chelsea’s players, pre-season disrupted by the Club World Cup, and conditioned for a style of play heavy on possession and (comparatively) light on running, had been left shattered by Rosenior’s attempts to get them to play a more intense style of football. There probably is some truth to that but, equally, it’s impossible to ignore how much more committed they seemed here. Even if that doesn’t necessarily equate to a downing of tools, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’d lost faith in Rosenior.

Manchester City will offer a wholly different level of opposition in the final on 16 May but there remains a possibility that Chelsea will begin and end the season with silverware, a frankly bewildering prospect given how badly they have played for so much of it, and how many obviously poor decisions have been made. McFarlane, improbably, might even become the first English manager since Harry Redknapp in 2008 to win a major English trophy.

It may not make much sense, but that’s the way Chelsea have been for two decades now. Spend enough money, buy enough good players, ride the tumult, and somehow trophies seem to arrive despite repeated failures of leadership.