Dreary Tie Fails to Soothe Chelsea Fans The only winner after Chelsea and Manchester City slugged out a grim and scoreless game Sunday evening was the leading team in the English title race, Manchester United. Chelsea's Stamford Bridge stadium in London was a desolate place. The home fans booed their new coach, Rafael Benítez, in the pouring rain. They sang for Roberto Di Matteo, the man fired to make way for Benítez. The paymaster up in the stands, the Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, sat wearing that familiar remote half-smile that nobody can quite interpret. Two heavyweight sides, each costing a billion dollars to assemble, appeared from first to last to hold on to what they had at the start - a single point rather than a thirst for victory. In many respects, this is no longer English soccer. Chelsea is wholly owned by Abramovich, a Russian. He does what he wants with his money. City is bankrolled from Abu Dhabi, and the sheik who pays the bills is rarely seen in Britain. The players, too, are almost exclusively foreign. Chelsea lined up with seven nationalities in its blue jerseys - only one of them, Ashley Cole, a Briton. City took to London a team of eight nationalities, with three Englishmen on the field. In many ways, this is positive. The Premier League is now a world league. It sells to television broadcasters around the globe. The skill factor is immeasurably better than it was a decade ago. The inescapable fact is that England does not develop skills on a par with the Spaniards, the South Americans, even these days the Belgians, who migrate to City, Chelsea, United because they pay the best and because they might, as Chelsea did in May, win the Champions League. There lies the cause of the dismay around Stamford Bridge. Six months ago in Munich, Abramovich gave Di Matteo a bear hug and a big grin after Di Matteo oversaw Chelsea's Champions League triumph. Di Matteo, a well-liked former Chelsea player, had rescued the season after players lost their unity over the team's previous coach, Abramovich's eighth in a decade, André Villas-Boas. Abramovich wanted, and still wants, another coach, Pep Guardiola, whose game was fostered in Barcelona, and whose style is so coveted. But Guardiola is in New York, determined to take time out with his family at least through Christmas. Chelsea and others who are courting him must wait. Chelsea won the Champions trophy with obduracy and never-say-die defense. Abramovich is right to want more, to hanker for entertainment. We assume, but no one knows because Abramovich is as silent as the sphinx, that he did not trust Di Matteo to carry through the transition he seeks. We assume that he believes the former Liverpool coach Benítez will make a better fist of driving the players to success. The immediate test is for Benítez to get out of Fernando Torres the goals that he seemed to score every other week at Liverpool. Torres scored 56 goals in 79 Premier League matches for Liverpool. At Chelsea, he has scored 19 goals in 88 appearances, and just one in his last nine. Torres appears to be trying. But he is isolated in this Chelsea team. He has visibly lost his greatest asset, the searing pace that would take him beyond the best of defenders, after knee surgery in 2010. If that isn't coming back, then who at Chelsea other than its owner is responsible for spending millions of pounds on a busted flush? The turnover of coaches is such that it cannot be the fault of any of the last three fired men: Carlo Ancelotti, Villas-Boas and now Di Matteo. But the dismay around the Bridge runs deeper. Some lifelong Chelsea fans are embarrassed by the way their club made baseless claims against a referee last month, accusing him of making a racist insult to one of the players, John Obi Mikel. Chelsea has made no apology even though the police and the soccer authorities have dropped their investigations. So a club on the brink of losing its Champions League trophy, but still with a chance of the English title, is now at odds with some of its own supporters. Sunday was a stalemate because both sides chose to strangle the creative life out of the other. The Man City captain, the Belgian Vincent Kompany, won his personal dual with Torres, and afterward Kompany acknowledged, "I suppose, as a defender, I take out of this game that we got a clean sheet, we did not let Chelsea score on its own pitch." Kompany, in fact, should perhaps have not even been in that defense. "I was on crutches 48 hours ago," he said, referring to the knee he wrenched against Real Madrid in midweek. I said I wouldn't play unless I could give 100 percent for the team, but it was a hard, hard match. Hard to play, hard to watch, and hard to see how the last week has helped Chelsea cast off its old, defensive approach and convert to what the owner apparently craves. That is for his Blues to entertain like Barcelona, but without Messi, Xavi and Iniesta, the geniuses who make it unique. The booing around the Bridge may not go away anytime soon.