“We knew we were better” – Makelele on the forgotten Chelsea – PSG game won by Drogba double | OneFootball

Chelsea face PSG in the Champions League tomorrow night, and Claude Makelele has looked back on a classic edition of that fixture.

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Chelsea face PSG tomorrow night and there’s a lot on the line. A little rivalry has been renewed by the Club World Cup Final in the summer. Before that, there were three years in a row where we faced them in the knockout stages, ten years ago.

But even before that, there was our original Champions League meeting – in the group stage in 2004, when we had only just started establishing ourselves as a Champions League team. One person who remembers that game well is Claude Makelele, who played for us that night and went on to play for the Parisians.

Chelsea knew they were better than PSG

“We knew we were better than them,” recalls Makelele of that night, when Chelsea ran out 3-0 winners.

“We had more competitive players in this team, players who had experience of playing in the Champions League and even winning the Champions League.

“I didn’t want to lose that one with Paris Saint-Germain! It’s my country, my capital – I started learning football in Paris. It was a big focus for me to win the game and we did, easily.”

In some ways it’s a bit of a forgotten game – it’s hard to remember back then that PSG were just another pretty average European team. There wasn’t anything special about facing them, apart from players like Makelele or Didier Drogba who had a connection (or the opposite) with them.

John Terry banged in a header from a Frank Lampard corner, Drogba scored off a rebound and enjoyed the jeers of the crowd, then got another from a free kick.

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