Gullit seeks bird of Euro paradise

After the sorry exit of Arsenal, Leicester, Rangers and Celtic, Chelsea fly Britain's battered flag in Europe tonight hoping to raise the standard in more ways than one.

Two-nil up from the first leg of their Cup Winners' Cup match in which they should have scored seven, Ruud Gullit's side will be optimistic though, as the cliche goes, naturally not complacent, about beating Slovan Bratislava and making it through to the second round of a competition they are the favour ties to win.

All optimism is well founded: this is the weakest of the three European competitions and, specifically tonight, Bratislava are not a strong team. They had to sell most of their best players to meet a financial short-fall and their one international, the play-maker Robert Tomas Chek, is suspended tonight along with the first-choice defender Jozef Antalovic. Chelsea's squad on the other hand is packed with caps and European experience.

However, the one factor which particularly points to a Chelsea victory this evening, and also to Gullit's side progressing further in Europe than other sides from these shores, is their glut of creativity.

One of the key reasons for Arsenal's defeat by Salonika on Tuesday was their shortage in this crucial department. Apart from Dennis Bergkamp, the rest of the team lacked the subtle ingenuity needed to succeed at this level.

Gone are the days when British teams could bulldoze their way to victory. Getting stuck-in might still be a Premiership currency, but it receives short change from Continental referees. As Gullit continually insists, the principal ingredients for European success are technique and tactics.

In that respect his team oozes the necessary class. Frank Leboeuf's passing from the back can be creatively sublime, Roberto Di Matteo and Gianfranco Zola are world class, Gustavo Poyet has been a midfield revelation, Dennis Wise has blossomed immeasurably - and that list does not include Mark Hughes, Gianluca Vialli and Dan Petrescu, internationals all, and even the wing-back Celestion Babayaro, in the squad for the first time since his summer arrival after recovering from a pre-season injury.

Of course, Chelsea could lose tonight, and so another theory goes down the tubes. But form is always mercurial. As Gullit observed yesterday with a poetry Eric Cantona would have been proud of: "Form is just like a bird that passes by. Sometimes you have it all the time around you, sometimes it just flies away and you don't know what the reason is."