Jose Mourinho ‘yelling’, Drogba leaving his foot in: How the MLS All-Stars beat Chelsea

In the summer of 2006, there was no more star-packed and fearsome team in world football than Chelsea.

Jose Mourinho’s men were the reigning back-to-back Premier League champions and had added to a glittering roster that already included the likes of Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and John Terry with the signings of Germany captain Michael Ballack and £30million Ukrainian striker Andriy Shevchenko.

Yet for a cobbled-together group of MLS standouts, the chance to take on the Special One’s special unit provided opportunity, not fear.

Well, perhaps a little fear.

“I wouldn’t say I relished it,” admits former San Jose Earthquakes and Houston Dynamo defender Eddie Robinson. “I probably had to change my underwear a couple of times. An MLS team had never played someone of that pedigree. It was all a bit surreal to us.”

“There was a responsibility that we felt, as a group and as the whole league,” says former Kansas City Wizards centre-back Jimmy Conrad. “It was a way for us to keep chipping away towards that respect that we thought we deserved.”

Major League Soccer at the time was just a decade old and still in its pre-Beckham, pre-pre-pre-Messi stage of fighting for relevance within the global football landscape.

READ: The inside story of the first MLS match: ‘Please, please, please no 0-0 game.’

The league had begun experimenting with the format of its All-Star game in an effort to brighten the spotlight shone upon it. Instead of the typical set-up of the best players from the Eastern Conference facing the best from the West, a single All-Star selection had, in recent years, taken on a guest team; first it was the US national side, then Guadalajara, then Fulham of the Premier League.

The invitees for the 2006 All-Star game, set to take place at the Chicago Fire’s brand-new 20,000-capacity Toyota Park, represented a giant reputational and qualitative step up.

“Chelsea felt like a big jump in competition,” says Conrad. “This one was gonna be different.”

“For us, this was another World Cup match,” Robinson adds. “Once we got to the stadium, it was, ‘Hey, guys, what have we got to lose? Everybody expects us to lose, so if we go out and win, some eyebrows will be raised around the world.’”

That would be easier said than done. The MLS All-Stars were replete with some of the best players of the league’s early years – Jaime Moreno, Dwayne De Rosario and even a 17-year-old Freddy Adu among the substitutes – plus a handful of USMNT stars recently returned from the World Cup in Germany. But Chelsea’s line-up was a soccer A-list so strong the likes of Arjen Robben, Joe Cole and Ricardo Carvalho had to settle for a spot on the bench.

After a first half in which Chelsea enjoyed the better of the scoring chances, the All-Stars entered the locker room at the interval happy with the 0-0 stalemate, but they were not unscathed.

“Drogba stepped on my heel a few minutes into the game and completely raked my Achilles,” Conrad remembers. “He said he didn’t do it on purpose, but I’ve played long enough to know what’s on purpose and what’s an accident. I thought, ‘That’s a little extra. He didn’t need to do that.’ So I waited about 30 minutes and completely hammered him from behind. He got up and took it because he knew I was coming at some point. It was cool to have those little moments in that game.”

“Unfortunately I threw out my meniscus in that game,” adds former USMNT striker Brian Ching. “I felt a tweak and knew something was wrong. It wasn’t until after the game that it swelled up. But the whole experience was amazing and fun to play in.”

Both Mourinho and Peter Nowak, the DC United coach overseeing the All-Stars, made sweeping changes at half-time. Chelsea removed a host of their superstars, and introduced several more: Carvalho, Cole, Robben, Lassana Diarra, Salomon Kalou and John Obi Mikel.

Conrad was brought on as one of seven half-time All-Star substitutions, and he soon played a central role in preserving the MLS side’s clean sheet with a miraculous goal-line clearance.

“Freddy Adu gave the ball away in midfield, our centre-back nutmegged our goalkeeper and I chased the ball back to my own goal,” he recalls. “All I could see in my mind was me smashing the ball into the net. That’s what I’m visualising. Someway – I don’t know how – we were able to keep it out.

“That might have given us a little bit of a spark to say, ‘OK, maybe we can do this.’”

That spark turned into fireworks in the 70th minute. Dwayne De Rosario, the gifted Canadian attacking midfielder and future league MVP (and F365 interviewee), deftly controlled the ball on the edge of the Chelsea penalty area before lashing an unstoppable shot beyond goalkeeper Hilario.

“Dwayne was always a big-game player,” says Ching, who was a Houston Dynamo team-mate of De Rosario’s at the time. “He was creative and he’d try different things. Those were the kind of games he really looked for, to prove himself against the best of the best. And he stepped up to the plate.

“He consistently did that for us, especially when we were winning championships with Houston. He was a big part of those runs because of his mentality. He viewed that game as something he wanted to make an impact in and he was able to do that.”

“Dwayne is one of the best MLS players of all time,” says Conrad, who’d previously played with De Rosario in San Jose. “He has an ability to step up in the biggest moments. This goal was a microcosm of what made him special, putting the team on his back and pulling something out of nothing. Dwayne definitely has the clutch gene. In my first year with him, he scored the winning goal in the MLS Cup final in extra time, so I’d seen it first-hand.”

It might have been just a pre-season game from Chelsea’s perspective, but the Premier League champions pressed to find an equaliser in the final minutes.

“The last 20 minutes was a blur,” Robinson says. “You look at the clock, it feels like 20 minutes have gone by but only two minutes have gone by. I don’t think anybody would have been too disappointed if Chelsea had pulled one back and it ended in a draw. But we thought, ‘Now we have a chance at this, why not give it our all? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’ It was all hands on deck.”

In stoppage time, goalkeeper Joe Cannon reacted quickly to deny Carvalho from close range. The MLS side hung on to record a memorable victory. And Mourinho’s reaction to the defeat suggested he did not appreciate losing to supposedly inferior opposition, even in an exhibition game. The Special One’s ire cost a few All-Stars the chance to snag a priceless memento.

“Once the whistle blew, I happened to be standing by Lampard,” Robinson says. “My instinct was: trade jerseys, trade jerseys, trade jerseys. I didn’t hesitate. So I got Lampard’s jersey. I felt bad, though, because Jose Mourinho was so angry that he raced his players off the field and into the locker room and locked all the doors, so a lot of guys didn’t get to trade jerseys with the Chelsea players. We were heading back to the locker room and you could hear him yelling. He was not happy at all about that result.”

“I was supposed to get Drogba’s jersey,” Conrad says. “The kit man from Chelsea took mine, but he never gave it back and never got me Drogba’s. I’m still gutted to this day.”

None of the All-Stars would have swapped the result for the chance to swap jerseys with their superstar opponents, though. The significance of their victory and its reputational ramifications for MLS was satisfaction enough.

“Over the years,” Robinson concludes, “results like that slowly add to the level of respect Major League Soccer is given around the world.”