JOSE Mourinho expectedly guided Chelsea to their fifth league crown and his third in his two stints with a pragmatic 1-0 success over hard-fighting Crystal Palace at Stamford Bridge Sunday afternoon. Juventus also did the job in a 1-0 road success against Sampdoria to clinch a fourth Serie A crown on the bounce, and a record-extending 31 Serie A titles overall.

The two joined Bayern Munich who clinched a third straight Bundesliga crown and a record-extending 24 titles overall with a 1-0 win against Hertha Berlin in the final week of April. I say a big congrats to these three giants.

Chelsea had been very bright and resplendent in the first half of the season, but quickly reverted to Mou’s famous pragmatic machine in the second half of the campaign, though there was never a doubt about their title success which was only a matter of when rather than whether.

The Blues led the campaign from Day 1 and it was it was testimony to their consistency that they won the league with three games to spare. They also dominated the PFA (and even my own) team of the season.

Interestingly, the victory which ultimately clinched the title came via a spurious penalty kick. On 44 minutes PFA’s player of the season, Edin Hazard danced into Palace’s box before diving to win the controversial spot-kick which the goalkeeper saved before the Blue forward headed the rebound into the bottom corner.

In fairness to ref Kevin Friend, the incident looked like a stonewall penalty in real life play. We only detected Hazard’s cheat in slow-mo replays. How ironic then that the title would be won via an undeserved penalty by Mourinho’s team, the Portuguese having complained all season long about refs “determination” not to award the Blues penalties.

But make no mistake, there could be no debate about Chelsea’s title credentials. It’s not Mou’s fault that others decided to move a couple of steps backwards after the swashbuckling campaign of last season. And we also have to give the self-styled Special One his due credits: in March last year, Mou predicted the Blues would be champions this season.

There were some doubters after the manner of his team’s average campaign last term. But Mou knew what his team lacked and quickly set about addressing them. He brought Nemanja Matic in January 2014, and completed the job by luring Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa from Spain. He also ended the loan move of young goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois.

Those were the final pieces of the jigsaw. And the result is what we have witnessed this season – league tables don’t lie, do they?

So a big congrats to all Blues family: my darling daughter Aisha, my late dad Alhaji Adisa Koleade, honourable parliamentarians like Future Care, all my Blues colleagues at work and a host of others who I can’t mention or don’t remember as I write. This is a title well deserved.

Please, permit me to also congratulate myself for correctly predicting the title success of Mou and his troop this season. It’s been five years since I’ve been predicting BPL champs on this forum.
Only last season did I get it wrong when ironically Mourinho and his Blues failed me and came third. So that’s four correct predictions out of five or 80% success which is excellent by any standard. But before I move to other issues, I need to ask ye Blue faithful this easy question: do you think you can repeat this feat next season? I await you honest response.

UCL SEMIS PROMISE AN EL CLASICO FINAL!

I GOT what I wanted when FC Barcelona were paired against FC Bayern Munich in the semis of the UCL that kick off on Tuesday. I expressed my wish to have the two pooled together at this stage once the group stages were over. I felt at the time that the two were the best in this season’s campaign and how sweet to have a two-legged clash between two teams of very similar styles.

But injuries have made me reconsider this fixture. I thought Bayern would have prevailed if they had a fully fit team. But because of this (injury woes) and the fact that Barca appear to be peaking at the right time – scoring 14 goals in their last two league matches – when Bayern appear to be struggling, I think the Catalans would win this clash and play in the final against Real Madrid who I reckon would be a notch too much for newly crowned Serie A champions Juventus.

My ideal final would have been Bayern versus Real Madrid. But current form and prevailing injury woes mean we might have to settle for an all Spanish final for a second season running. Ordinarily an El Clasico final should be mouth-watering. But my reservation about the prospects of this happening is the last El Clasico which held at Camp Nou; that was a very dour match despite parading arguably the highest number of world’s best players.

Experience shows that final derbies don’t usually live up to expectations – the all-Madrid derby of last season’s final readily comes to mind. Even we may also recall the all-Madrid quarter-final clash of this season. The all-German final of 2013, the all-English final of 2008 and the all-Italian final of 2003 are some examples of derbies that bored many to sleep.

So while predicting an El Clasico final, I’ll be praying for a Bayern miracle to save us another potentially dull derby finale. Juve are the weakest team in the semis in my opinion and after watching their terribly boring two-legged quarter-finals against modest AS Monaco, I can easily predict they would adopt another cut-throat catennaccio should they make it to the Berlin showpiece.

A Juve final clash with any of either Barca or Bayern would ensure a very monotonous one-sided finale which might not linger long in the memory. I’m sure nobody wants that. In fact the last two times the Old Lady played in the showpiece produced only one goal when they lost 1-0 to Real Madrid in 1998. The other final of these two was a goalless 120 minutes against AC Milan which the latter went on to win via spot-kick lottery.

These are reasons why I don’t want Juve in final. But the good thing is my wish counts for nothing when it comes to determining who play in the final. That will be down to performance of all the remaining four gladiators. So guys, who do you think will play in Berlin?