English FA Premiership: Flags were at half mast, which was right for Brian Clough but half a mast too high for Middlesbrough, who had no excuse for bunting at all and little for so barren a performance. And that in turn gave Chelsea less reason to celebrate than they found.

"Pass the ball" was Clough's mantra and he did not mean to the opposition. Boro gave the ball away a dozen times in the first five minutes and got little better - and this under a man tipped to be the England manager Clough never was.

Clough scored 197 goals in 213 games for Boro, compared with Michael Ricketts' three in 32. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink's rate at Chelsea was one in two but he and his team-mates did not give Petr Cech anything to save. "It only takes a second to score a goal," said Clough. Boro have gone two league games and a half without managing it.

Chelsea had gone three and a half until, nine minutes from the end, they caught Boro's defence unawares and averted a third successive goalless draw. Frank Lampard made as if to flight a free-kick, Didier Drogba dropped off and, as Jose Mourinho said, "they made a connection".

It enabled the manager to be more engagingly embattled than after Spurs denied them the previous week. Then, though acknowledging an imbalance in power, he had complained at Spurs' lack of ambition. Imagine Ronnie O'Sullivan chiding an opponent for snookering him on the basis that people had come to see him clear the table. What are managers for if not to outwit and overcome whatever confronts them? In victory rather than frustration Mourinho could see how his side might be asked thorny questions: "Every opinion remembers the financial side. Every knife is in Chelsea's direction, all the flowers in the other direction. But we have to live with it."

For the moment he is having to live with a side making little penetration, then wasting what does get through. "We control our opponents and control the game," said the control freak. "Just the important last touch is missing. One day somebody will be unlucky."

At the present rate of striking, a goal a game, somebody will have to be very unlucky. Drogba, all £24 million of him, missed golden, silver and bronze chances before scoring. Damien Duff, in his first start, needed the example of Boro substitute Stewart Downing to go wide enough for maximum effect.

Mourinho, for all his access to Russian oil fields, cannot find a drop for his attack. This is a side whose defensive instinct surpasses in organisation that which is condemned in others and may be found in his old charges and champions Porto on Wednesday. Asked if it would be emotional, he said: "No, no. There is no room for emotion. There are no friends in football in the 90 minutes."

Boro, still starry-eyed about Europe as they go to Ostrava with a 3-0 lead, had Colin Cooper, 37, pressed into service beside Gareth Southgate, 34. The 65th-minute substitutes said more about their depleted ranks: for Chelsea two at £13 million the pair, for Boro an 18-year-old debutant from Darlington.

Boro, already depleted, lost three more in action. Hasselbaink, after 10 stitches in a head wound, bloodied so many number 18 shirts that he finished in one of Ugo Ehiogu's. No wonder Boro were wan. Clough said he wanted "no profound epitaph" but he cannot have expected a 90-minute silence.