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It's Didier Drogba day in London. Hurray! Hopefully the celebrations don't extend to the pitch -- Chelsea need this win and I'm not about to endorse the idea of someone scoring against us just because they're really fantastic -- but otherwise today should be about celebrating the return of a legend.
But... what id he'd never left at all? According to Drogba, that was actually a possibility:
Why did I leave Chelsea? I didn't want to talk about that, but I would have stayed if we could find a satisfactory agreement for both parties.
-Source: Sky Sports.
Taken at a certain value, that's a bit of a silly quote. "I would have stayed if both parties had agreed to me staying" is a fairly meaningless tautology and probably not one we should pay a great deal of attention to. But there's something else there too, the feeling that although the Champions League win in 2012 marked the natural end of Drogba's tenure at Stamford Bridge, we've never managed to properly replace him. Chelsea aren't over Drogba, and he wasn't necessarily over Chelsea either.
Having a real striker for the past couple of years would have been nice, and although Drogba's obviously not in the same class as, say, Edinson Cavani or Sergio Aguero, he could have made enough of an impact to help us out in the Premier League this year. Alas.
