"Are you watching Manchester ?"

There are times when you feel really privileged to support Chelsea, and last night was definitely one of them. Chelsea put on a display of determined and skillful football that blew away even the talented Real Betis. Anyone who still says the ECWC is easy after seeing the way Betis can play wants their head examining. There's no easy ride in Europe, especially once you get to the latter stages of a given competition, as our northern friends found out on Wednesday night (smirk !). The fact that Chelsea put five goals past Betis is proof that they really can beat anyone when they're in the right frame of mind; it's just getting them into that state a bit more often that's lacking.

We were once again in the wraparound of the Shed upper, right up at the back just under the scoreboard. You're actually getting the same view as the people at the front of the east upper, in fact you're only separated by a metal barrier. The atmosphere was good, as you'd expect for a game of this importance. We were in good voice as the game kicked off. Unfortunately, Betis seemed to have had problems reading the English script, and mounted an unsporting and determined attack on our defence. Chelsea soaked it up for twenty minutes or so, until Betis scored a cracking goal from a shot from "Finicky" George. Strangely, it didn't seem to dampen the enthusiasm of either Chelsea or the fans, and within minutes Vialli had had a thumping header crashing against the bar, and Zola had curled a sublime free kick onto the far post.

Once Chelsea got the ball away from the Betis' attacking midfield, they looked dangerous, as Betis' defence were surprisingly ragged. Inevitably, Chelsea struck back, courtesy of the eccentric "Mad" Frankie Sinclair, who rose to a perfectly lofted free kick from Zola, and crashed his header into the Betis net. Cue uproar from the fans, I ended up two rows down from where I'd started, hugging a bloke who looked like he was on day release from Rampton. Football is a great leveller, but this was ridiculous. I crept back to my seat to the accompaniment of hoots of laughter from my "mates" at my antics, but I was too delirious to care. What a great feeling.

I was delighted to see Mad Frankie score; as you will know by now, he's a firm favourite of mine. As I've said before, he scares the life out of everyone most of the time, but his commitment is absolute. I've never seen the guy shirk a tackle or fail to take on responsibility in a game, so I was really pleased when he scored, and even more pleased when he was voted man of the match - I was just praying that he'd keep his trousers on this time !

Betis continued to look dangerous, with Alfonso and Finicky George looking horribly sharp, but they were let down by their defence. They were guilty of naivety in the extreme, allowing themselves to be drawn away from our attackers. It wasn't long before the increasingly excellent Zola found Vialli unmarked inside the box to the left of the goal, his low shot to the keeper's front post almost fooling Prats, who somehow got a hand to it and managed to hang on.

We were approaching half time now, and Betis were starting to become frustrated by Chelsea's muscular approach, which more often than not resulted in extravagant continental writhing competitions. It really was pathetic how often the German referee was suckered into awarding free kicks for perfectly ordinary tackles by Chelsea players. He really was appalling. He was literally goose-stepping around the place at one point, as Petrescu said something to him after a particularly stupid decision; he stormed over to Dan and swung his arm into an unfortunate Hitler-type salute with the yellow card, almost using it as a weapon: within seconds 20,000 people were mimicking him by wildly throwing their arms around, you had to laugh.

What gets on my nerves in European games is that muscular but fair tackling of the sort you see week in week out in the Premiership is consistently penalised, whereas blatant cheating, like gobbing in someone's ear, slapping people round the face, acting as though poleaxed when tackled, and all the other nasty and unpleasant little tricks they get up to, are seen as legitimate. The scenes as the players left the pitch at half time were disgraceful, with the Spaniards turning on the Chelsea players and having to be pulled off them by their coaching staff. Where the hell was the ref ? The only good thing about it all was seeing the disciplined way that Chelsea were dealing with it.

After the break, during which I was appalled to find that none of my so-called friends had managed to produce any Bovril, there was more trouble, with the ref and the Betis coaches having a set-to, but I can't tell you what happened as I couldn't see anything from where I was. Apparently the Betis coach was demanding to fight "any man in this ground" as the Police escorted him to the cells, but I could be wrong.

Five minutes later Chelsea scored number two, as Robbie Di Matteo robbed the ball off a Betis player's foot and sprinted clear to sidefoot past Prats. Cue more mayhem in the stands. I was disappointed to see the looks of fear in my friends' eyes as I rushed to embrace them. Zola then put the icing on the cake with another goal in the last minute, to make the celebrations complete. A fantastic evening, and nice to see the Chelsea defence playing such a solid game.

Players drawing my attention in particular were:

• Franco Zola; a pleasure to see him approaching something like his best - he was the dynamo that powered Chelsea last night
• The back four; Mad Frankie, Doobs, Beefy and Clarkey played as solid a game as you could hope
• "Land" De Goey; didn't have a great deal to do, but when called on he was superb
• Robbie Di Matteo; a well-taken goal, and thoroughly professional when subjected to what can only be described as attempted GBH by the atrociously dirty Canas
• Luca Vialli, for a performance that consisted largely of falling over, but when he stayed on his feet he looked good, and worked harder than most,
• Dennis Wise, who also had to put up with tantrums from Canas, and reacted with tough professionalism.