The whole notion of there being a ‘right’ way to play is baffling. Defending is part of the game but there must be no place for violence or cheating

When a team are 13 points clear at the top of the table and have been manifestly the best side in the league that season, perhaps it’s only natural that others should look for sticks with which to beat them. In Chelsea’s case, it’s because some apparently consider them boring, a point Arsenal fans made with gusto during last Sunday’s 0-0 draw – you hope, given their past, with at least some semblance of irony.

José Mourinho’s riposte this week was magnificent. “People talk about style and flair but what is that?” he said. “Sometimes I ask myself about the future, and maybe the future of football is a beautiful, green grass carpet without goals, where the team with more ball possession wins the game. The way people analyse style and flair is to take the goals off the pitch.” But then there are many who find possession football dull – as demonstrated by the countless complaints about Spain as they won the World Cup and second European Championship.

Even allowing for the fact that the majority prefer attack to defence while respecting the need for some balance between the two, boring is often in the eye of the beholder. Nobody could realistically argue, for instance, that Chelsea’s Champions League semi-final performances against Barcelona in 2012 were boring, and yet in both legs they sat deep and denied Barça space in the final third – just as they did against Manchester United the weekend before last.

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The piece last week in which I pointed out that Mourinho is better at shutting games down than anybody else at the highest level – indeed, pretty much unique in doing so – wasn’t intended as criticism or complaint, although plenty took it as such. The analogy to Satan in Paradise Lost referred to his relationship with Barcelona and to his apparent relish for his role as the antipode to their style of football – and, as anyone who’s read the poem will know, one of its fascinations is the struggle Milton has to ensure Satan never becomes the hero, even though he is far more engaging than pretty much all of those aligned on the side of Heaven, who often come across as self-righteous or priggish (and have the omnipotent on their side, which rather dilutes any sense of their personal drama).

But the whole notion of there being a “right” way to play is baffling. Who decides? Some like skeins of neat passes; some like the clatter of centre-back and centre-forward attacking a cross; some like rapid counterattacks; some even can admire a well-organised defence. The term “anti-futbol” to suggest that there was a way of playing so far removed from the “right” way as to be its antithesis was coined in Argentina in the 50s for the Vélez Sarsfield side of Vittorio Spinetto. They were not one of the five grandes of the Argentinian game, but became renown for the way they battled. They worked hard, were organised and disciplined and that created resistance in a country in which footballers were supposed to stagger from the tango halls to the stadium, pausing only for a chicken casserole and a restorative bottle of malbec.

By the end of the 60s the term had taken on far more sinister connotations, thanks largely to the Estudiantes of Osvaldo Zubeldía. They started off as organised grafters, but soon became noted for their dirty tricks, winding up opposition players, spitting on them and punching them when the referee’s back was turned, even, according to some reports, stabbing opponents with pins. Their violence reached a nadir when three players were arrested following a particularly brutal Intercontinental Cup final against Milan in 1969.

That was anti-football, a systematic attempt to despoil, to prevent the other team from playing by any means necessary. When moral codes are debated in football, this point seems key: there is a major difference between cheating and playing defensively.

But even then there are difficulties in defining precisely what cheating consists of. Every British team that toured South America before the second world war ran into the same issue: they found opponents who were happy to obstruct them but were outraged by a shoulder-charge or a clattering tackle. The same ideology lies behind the modern British aversion to diving and waving imaginary cards and, though it is declining, the demand that players must be able to “take a tackle”. Which is more detrimental to the game, Diego Maradona punching the ball past Peter Shilton or Terry Fenwick kicking lumps out of him all game?

There are fundamentalists on both sides, from those who believe players should do anything in their power to win to those such as Paul Tisdale, who won’t let his Exeter City side take the ball into the corner to run down the clock in the closing minutes. However stringent and detailed a set of laws, there will always be grey areas and it is within them that a personal morality must be negotiated.

But none of that makes defending wrong. Anti-futbol is an unhelpful term in that it has two quite distinct meanings: the football of organisation and effort on the one hand and the football of Machiavelli on the other. Both are pragmatic, but only one is immoral. Mourinho’s Porto often did dive, waste time and feign injury but his Chelsea, while far from perfect, are no worse than anybody else in the Premier League. Where they do differ is in their capacity to defend, to play without the ball, to manage games – and even then, as Mourinho said, they’ve only started to play like that since fatigue set in in January.

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The only real doubt is whether, after all the investment they’ve had over the past decade, Chelsea should be producing something more overtly thrilling – but that is a matter for Roman Abramovich, who apparently tired of Mourinho’s astringency in his first spell, but is seemingly prepared to accept something more functional this (although you do wonder whether his art-dealer girlfriend would prefer something more obviously aesthetically pleasing), and Chelsea fans, who presumably, aren’t yet sated enough with trophies to start insisting they win in a particular way.

Everybody else should probably just accept that defending is part of football and football, despite what people keep saying, isn’t an entertainment – or rather, it’s a specific form of entertainment in which the struggle of one side against the other is paramount. If it weren’t, tens of thousands would turn out on street corners to watch freestylers; Mourinho’s satirical proposal to play without goals and measure possession wouldn’t go far enough: football would be played by one team only, doing tricks around cones and being marked, like ice dancing or diving by a panel of judges.

It is part of football’s richness that there is such a variety of ways to play it and it’s an oddity of the present that so many follow the Barcajax route. But as Jürgen Klopp, Diego Simeone and Mourinho have proved, possess and press isn’t the only way. If Chelsea fans are annoyed by the jibes, they might remember that no side that defends poorly is ever described as boring.