Managers lie for a living. It was Tommy Docherty, one of Guus Hiddink’s predecessors at Chelsea, who cheerfully told a court that — and he told the truth.

Mainly they lie in a white way, as we all do out of politeness, or in the interests of practicality (the player dropped because he has lost a fortune on the horses and suddenly cannot kick a ball straight for worrying was “injured in training”, and so on), but occasionally they come out with a whopper. Like Hiddink’s in Barcelona.

On the eve of the Champions League semi-final, first leg, Chelsea’s interim manager trumpeted an intention to attack. It was no use sitting back and waiting for Barcelona to win; his team would fight fire with fire, or words to that effect. Instead they fought fire with a wet blanket, which was perfectly sensible and instrumental in the scoreless outcome that makes Chelsea favourites to reach the final. So neither the journalists who had dutifully conveyed Hiddink’s remarks — some hailed them as a fascinating insight into the Dutch master’s pre-match thoughts — nor fans who had taken them at face value were in a mood to complain.

Whether Barcelona fell for them we cannot tell. It is unlikely to have affected their approach because, under Pep Guardiola, the technical blitzkrieg appears their only tactic. But the cynicism of Chelsea was also management-led. Hiddink’s players fouled three times as often as Guardiola’s, relying on the indulgence of the German referee to keep Michael Ballack on the field and deny Barcelona a blatant penalty (Wolfgang Stark’s failure to punish José Bosingwa for tugging Thierry Henry’s shirt was as serious as Howard Webb’s judgment against Heurelho Gomes, the Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper, at Old Trafford last weekend).

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It worked, though, and now the voices urging Roman Abramovich to persuade Hiddink to stay at Stamford Bridge beyond the end of the season, when he is due to return to Russia for the rest of the World Cup qualification campaign, will be raised for another few days.

Should Barcelona be dispatched on Wednesday, they will become deafening. Yet they should not be heard at all. A white lie is acceptable, but Hiddink has given the Russians his solemn word and to break it would be something else; imagine Fabio Capello deserting England for Chelsea and you have an idea of it.

Anyway, Capello saw the ironic aspect of Hiddink’s spoiling tactics. Teasing English journalists, he asked how they would have reacted had he come to England with an Italian team and played in such a way. He was grinning, but he had a point to which it would be interesting to hear Abramovich’s response. The owner is supposed to want Chelsea to play expansively, to triumph gloriously as Real Madrid did at Old Trafford on the night in 2003 when they knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League — watched by the super-rich Russian destined to own Chelsea.

Surely that was part of the reason Chelsea parted company with José Mourinho. So do they need a Hiddink or someone more like his compatriot, Frank Rijkaard, who, while guiding Barcelona through the Ronaldinho years, did not let the requirement to provide festive football prevent him from emulating Hiddink and the supposed leading candidate for the Chelsea succession, Carlo Ancelotti, of AC Milan, by winning Europe’s top prize?

They need none of these. Hiddink has his commitments. Rijkaard comes with no guarantee that the Barcelona culture can be swiftly instilled in an alien environment. Ancelotti likewise: after all the years in Milanello’s halls of Ivy League academe, he may find it hard to adjust to upstart red-brick Cobham.

The answer lies closer to home. Fulham make the short trip to Stamford Bridge today in the care of a manager with Serie A experience and much more. One who has made a Europe-chasing team from relegation fodder in 18 months and is at the peak of his powers. Roy Hodgson should have got the England job. Not because he is better than Capello but because he is English — and that, like Hiddink’s word, should be a matter of principle. Hodgson was ready to cap his career then and he is ready now.

Meanwhile, Hiddink heads for a glittering farewell. What tripe will he feed us before Barcelona trot out at the Bridge — Petr Cech to play up front? Then, after the probability of Rome, there is his date with Wembley for the FA Cup Final. Hiddink didn’t tell the truth about Wembley, either, did he?

Maybe he was clever, too, after the semi-final against Arsenal, praising the pitch to banish an excuse from his players’ heads before the final. In which case you may think he has stolen a march on David Moyes, the Everton manager. But wasn’t it as well, since the pitch was a disgrace, that we had Moyes, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger around to talk straight?