Jose Mourinho was determined to downplay a special night for Chelsea – insisting the quarter-final win over PSG was no more than par for the course for a club of the Blues' stature.
It needed Demba Ba's late goal to give Chelsea victory on away goals and Mourinho, wearing a tracksuit rather than a suit, appeared to charge off down the touchline in celebration when the winning goal was struck.
But it turned out he was just trying to give out instructions to his strikers about how to play out the remaining three minutes of the match.
“It's a good one, a good victory, but so many semi-finals for me, so many semi-finals for Chelsea. Nothing extraordinary,” Mourinho said.
“Good, because we lost 3-1 [in the first leg] and to change that result is always difficult. But the players are not jumping in the dressing room. No. Just two minutes and done.”
About that charge down the touchline after Ba's goal, Mourinho said it was 'not to celebrate'.
“It was to tell the players how we had to play the last 10 minutes,” said the Portuguese.
“I knew at that moment they wanted to celebrate, to think the game is over. They forget that they had three plus three or four other minutes to play, and the way we were playing we couldn't carry on winning 2-0.
“I had to go there because it would be the only chance I'd have to tell Demba, Fernando and Schurrle what to do in the last seven minutes. But you could see I can still run.”
Mourinho added: “The players followed our plan, our ambition. All we win, all we lose, but without any energy to go home.
“We have to be, at the end of the game, either so happy with the result or so happy with ourselves. And we were lucky because we have the result we fought for.
“But, if for some reason we hadn't scored the second, or if they had scored from the last corner in the last moment to send us out, everybody in this club would still have been proud of the boys.”
