ANYTHING would be better - literally [ianything[/i. A flip of the coin would be better as at least that gives a 50/50 chance to both sides rather than penalties which inately favour the worse performing team on the night. A chess match in the centre circle between the 2 managers or captains would even be better. It is just lunacy that we keep letting the biggest games in the sport be decided by means that has nothing to do at all with an actual football match and which decisively favours the lesser performing team.... You might as well just give the trophy to the team that has the fewest shots on goal or least amount of possession and be done with it for the rank unfairness of it all.

I've said this before, but I think us winning the penalty shoot out should have meant the replay was played at Stamford Bridge. I just don't think penalties is an appropriate way to decide Champions League finals and World Cup finals.



As pens is the way they decide it, I think it's the best way to "lose" the final and the worst way to win it.



The 90 minutes were really pushing it though. I thought that we defended nowhere near well enough and our counter attacks were made without any conviction or plan. We were pretty much reliant on Didier or pens, and it turned out to be Didier and pens.



Just made up for Didier Drogba. The biggest legend in Chelsea history. I think that this should be a goodbye, and what a goodbye it was. It was a Hollywood ending that would have been laughed at for being too far fetched.



I hope Roberto stays at the club as an assistant to "whoever", with the plan of learning and hopefully taking over in 5 years time with a lot more knowledge and experience with him. Another Chelsea legend - FA Cup winning goalscorer, FL cup winning goalscorer, FA Cup winning manager and CL winning manager.



Man we were lucky though. I think we've bottled up all the luck from the last five years and forfeited the next five years too. There's no way this team should have won, playing as we did.

How does it favour the worst performing team?



It was at Bayern's ground. It was at the Bayern end. They scored the first three, we missed our first one. We absolutely and utter suck at pens and the Germans are renowned for them.



You can't possibly believe that flipping a coin is better than pens to decide it. At least it is down to the players.

Disagree, imo, apart from the last ten minutes, the penalty shootout was the most exciting part of the game, it's tense (for fans and players), it's about holding your nerve.



It's far too late to back this up with facts, and I look forward to being proved wrong, but surely there's no correlation between the 'better' team losing more often than not on penalties... As a Man United fan, I went to the FA cup final against Arsenal where we did them over for 120 mins, then lost, but on the other hand in Moscow in 2008, we were the better team (imo) and won...

It's the same as losing a game you dominate, surely you only remember the ones you lost, and couldn't really care less when you win...



Back on topic, well done Chelsea. Nice to have another English team at the top of Europe again...

Chelsea deserve their success.



On the night they were lucky, but they've plugged away doggedly over the past 8 years and been damned unlucky in that time on many occasions. Abramovich looked triumphant, you could tell he's been awaiting this moment a long time.



As for bayern, geez that sucks. It's not like the CC in rugby league where you can make the final pretty easily, this competition is really bloody hard to win and when you make the final you need to take the chance of glory. Losing 2 finals in 3 years sucks, theres no positive to that.

Well done Chelsea, pleased for the Drog, PL legend when he's not being a tart



amazing goal elsewhere



google



'Radamel Falcao scores one of the all time great goals v America de Cali'

They've already won it four times. To take it for a 5th time when we've never won it would have just been greedy.

Brilliant goal but what kind of marking is that? If there was a defender stood anywhere close then he wouldn't have even been allowed to attempt that because it'd be dangerous play.

All the great teams who have won it plenty of times all had an era where they had exceptional teams and won it multiple times in a short period to rack up their tally.



You have madrid, 5 times on the trot when the competition first came into inception, then munich 3 times on the trot in the 70's, then liverpool in the late 70's early 80's, milan in the late 80's and early 90's.



Otherwise teams just don't win it often, not unless they are exceptional. You'll forgive me for saying so, but this chelsea team is not exceptional and neither is the bayern team, neither will win the competition in the near future.

I am gutted for Robben though. I obviously retain a little bit of admiration for Mourinho, and I hold Robben in nearly high as regard. An awesome player, the best talent I've ever seen in a Chelsea shirt.

I think the team and the circumstances are the worst they've been since Roman bought the club. I don't think the team is exceptional, but the fact that we won the thing, and the manner we did it, is exceptional IMO.



Doing it with a caretaker manager, with players who are pretty much over the hill, being knocked around on the field, getting your players sent off, suspended and handing out ridiculously soft pens.



In many ways it is more exceptional that we won it than the Barca sides did. They were the best side in Europe - winning the CL is where the best sides should be. But we shouldn't have won it this year, the scousers shouldn't have won it, Wimbledon shouldn't have won the FA Cup.

Robben is a special talent, his goal that won it for them at Old Trafford was technically superb, bit of a whining sh/t but thats not uncommon in the game these days

In pure psychological terms how could it not? Which of these teams is going to enter a shootout in a more positive frame of mind do you think: The one that's dominated the game and should have won comfortably but had the fates conspire against them to rob them of what should already have been their deserved win, or the team that's been outclassed and had to hang on desperately for dear life for 2 hours fearing the inevitable worst but that has somehow escaped? How could that fail to be of benefit to the worse team, I mean seriously - how? Shootouts may or may not favour the lesser team by a significant margin statistically (and I don't know how on earth anyone could fairly correlate the statistics to do so) but at the very, very least they do no favours at all to the better performing team over the 120 minutes and that even in and of itself is just plain not right nor fair. It's like stopping an F1 race 100 yards from the finishing line and then making all the cars finish that last 100 yards starting lined up side-by-side as a drag race. It has nothing to do with the nature of the sport at all, is utterly unfair and makes a mockery of the entire rest of the event leading up to that point.



As much as anything else though, shootouts are destroying football as an entertainment at the highest level. How many big finals these days are any kind of a spectacle at all? The fact is that most teams, terrified of the career-ending consequences of adventure counting against them, are content to sit back and take no risks for 120 minutes, safe in the knowledge that they have a 50/50 chance of winning the trophy at the end of it whatever, with the comforting and chairman-defusing excuse that "we only lost on penalties so were unlucky" if they don't. I'm sick and tired of being bored rigid by big finals full of 11 men behind the ball tedium now frankly. Something should be done to force both teams to at least have to [itry[/i and win these big games, and lord knows penalties aren't it....







But it has nothing to do with the game or the sport and is a completely artificial adjunct to it.... If you want to artificially have tension and excitement over and above all then why not just scrap the tedious 2 hours altogether and make the teams play "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "The Cube" instead? At a football match I want to watch 2 teams playing a game of football and for the result to be played out and won in footballing terms, preferably in as entertaining and enterprising a manner as possible. If I want to see manufactured "tension" and "excitement" then I'll go watch a movie instead.

Agree with that. The camera shot from behind him when he was soaking up what could be his final Chelsea moment was extraordinarily poignant. I'm no fan of Chelsea but I am a fan of seeing people experience that feeling of celebration. It's one of the finest feelings in life and everybody deserves to have it.

They didn't - MK did

The way you talk you'd think that Bayern were leading 5-0 but that had been scrapped and the game gone to penalties instead.



The reason that the game went to pens is because the game ended 1-1. I don't dispute whatsoever that Bayern were the better side and we were very lucky to end the game level, but they should have buried some of their chances and not had this problem.



And don't forget that Bayern only qualified by winning a penalty shoot out in the semi, we beat Barcelona to reach the final, they needed the shoot out.







I hate them as a way to decide WC and CL finals, but it's ridiculous to say they are destroying the entertainment.







The notion that we weren't taking a risk is ridiculous. I don't think we defended particularly well. It was a huge risk surrendering so much possession and territory and I think it's a miracle it paid off.



But it does seem that you're not really condemning penalty shoot outs, you just don't want the wrong teams winning them. I guess you'd prefer it to go to a public vote like American Idol?







Bayern Munich should have done that by actually scoring. It's not down to the UEFA/FIFA to dictate the methods and tactics of sides.







The only reason it happens is BECAUSE BOTH TEAMS ARE LEVEL AT THE END OF 90 AND 120 MINUTES. It's not something that was introduced to create tension, it was simply introduced to separate the sides after a stalemate.

TBH when I saw Ashley Cole walking up to take his penalty, I thought the script was for him to miss. My thought was, "Everyone hates him, they are going to love it if he misses the decisive pen like Terry did."

What now for RA and Chelsea. Will RA dig deep in the summer or look at F1 again?

I'm sure somewhere, John_D is sat with a contented smile on his face having been proved entirely correct about a particular club-footed Bayern centre forward

Gomez stunk the place out, but showed tremendous mental toughness to step up for a penalty and put it away so clinically after such a poor performance.



No ones mentioned him yet what about bastien schweinsteiger? You have to feel sorry for him, a top professional, someone who's given blood and sweat to bayern over the years, someone who consoled lampard in Bloemfontein during the world cup 2 years ago instead of gloating...it was cruel for him to miss the decisive penalty.

It's called mental resilience. Not all people are as susceptible to it as you appear to think it is.

That one result could really screw Spurs up. Missing out on CL football, all the money it brings and weren't a couple of their star players like Bale saying he'll look to move on if they didn't qualify?!

It will IMO. A few of their stars will end up going elsewhere for CL football and they'll be back to where they started a few years ago.



Very cruel considering the season they've had. They'll dust themselves down and go again, redknapp is a very positive manager, but it will be tougher next year.

Simple question: which set of players would have been happier to hear the whistle at the end of extra time knowing that the previous 120 minutes no longer mattered and everything was now reset back to 50/50? Which team would have been in a more positive frame of mind and looking forward to it more going into the shootout: Chelsea or Bayern? Repeat the exercise for any game you've ever seen ending in a shootout.



Exactly.



Penalty shootouts benefit the worse team - that's just plain bare-faced fact. I'm a little bemused how anyone could reasonably argue otherwise?

Probably bayern, they won the semi on a peanlty shootout, whereas many chelsea players will have carried the scars of moscow.