When Roman Abramovich began his lavish spree at Chelsea, the idea that the Champions League trophy might fall into his lap by virtue of him outspending all his rivals struck most of us as a depressing prospect. Could this greatest, most coveted of club trophies be bought so easily?

We need not have worried. Someone (perhaps gods of football exist) decreed that success in Europe should not come readily to the Russian.

All kinds of torments were invented - from a phantom goal at Anfield to an agonising missed penalty in Moscow to last season’s colossal incompetence by a Norwegian referee - to keep the trophy just beyond his grasp.

That succession of near misses led us yesterday to the Peter Bonetti suite at Stamford Bridge where Chelsea presented the latest manager with the job of securing the Champions League for his Russian boss.

Like the Flower Show, this has become an annual event. A manager is revealed and we try to gauge how long he will last — which can be about as long as the flowers. If Carlo Ancelotti manages a whole season, that will be more than his three immediate predecessors.

The number of Chelsea directors, fixers, apparatchiks and advisers squeezed into the front row yesterday, laughing at Ancelotti’s jokes, showed how much they want him to succeed.

There were more suits on show than in Moss Bros.

But the wisdom in appointing the former AC Milan coach, or his chances of succeeding where José Mourinho, Avram Grant and Guus Hiddink so narrowly failed, remained hard to pin down despite a good-natured opening address from the jowly Italian.

Jokingly he told journalists from his home country that he only spoke English these days, and he responded to a question about his own wellbeing by saying: “Fine, thanks. How are you?” His minders beamed, as no doubt did Abramovich wherever he was watching, but much work is still to be done by Ancelotti to prove that he has been worth a two-year pursuit at the expense of other leading domestic candidates such as Martin O’Neill.

Unlike Fabio Capello or Mourinho, Ancelotti does not have a record that guarantees trophies.

His CV is curiously contradictory with two Champions League titles, including the 2006-07 crushing of Manchester United and Liverpool, undermined by a poor record of only one league title and one Italian Cup in a decade at Juventus and Milan.

He is not a brilliant spotter of talent or a coach with radical theories or tactics. The most interesting technical development of his eight years at the San Siro was the transformation of Andrea Pirlo into a World Cup-winning holding midfield player.