The old footballing truism is that the team is an extension of the manager’s personality. If that is the case, then why aren’t Chelsea and Liverpool the chalk and the cheese of England’s elite football teams? The more you see of these managers, the more impossible it seems that they were born on the same planet, never mind the same European peninsular.

Yet the more you watch their two football teams in combat – and we shall get yet another chance next week, when this Champions League semi-final moves into its second leg – the more disturbingly similar they seem: almost as if the same manager were responsible for both teams.

José Mourinho, Portuguese manager of Chelsea, is permanently preposterous; Rafael BenÍtez, Spanish manager of Liverpool, is perpetually plausible. One exists, it seems, on the far edge of reason: the other is at pains to project his sanity. One is dedicated to the idea of being extraordinary, the other to being almost bizarrely ordinary.

One loves the theatricality of his role, and has dedicated his time in England to becoming a ham actor specialising in the part of himself. The other appears to shrink from public occasions, and to cover up his embarrassment when caught by the cameras by turning into Señor Sensible.

But I wonder: is Mourinho really a member of Monty Python’s Silly Party, as he always appears? Or is he in truth a secret, plainclothes member of the Sensible Party?

For last night, as it is every time Chelsea take to the field, the flamboyance stays on the safe side of the touchline. The manager pouts and gesticulates and mugs for the camera, but the players, despite their cosmopolitan extraction, play plumb old remorseless English football.

And so do Liverpool. Both sides play with the emphasis on defence. Both are led by a pile-driving English captain: a man who sets the tone for the team. Neither is renowned for great touch, or for exotic skills, still less the remotest desire to try a trick. But both John Terry, of Chelsea, and Steven Gerrard, of Liverpool, are players of great heart.

Heart is what has taken Chelsea to so many last-gasp victories this season and it was heart that took Liverpool to that great night in Istanbul two years ago when they won the Champions League final from three goals down.

So last night was always going to be an encounter in which heart and defence and organisation were going to matter far more than flamboyant individuality.

The managers made much of their differences in the build-up to this match, but in the end, they both sent out their English-hearted, defence-dominated sides and we set out to see if they would cancel each other out quite as effectively as they did two years ago, when a single goal separated the sides over two legs at the same stage of the same competition.

Substance, not style. Expedience, not glory. Perfectly legitimate ways of approaching the game: there’s not much room for soul on the scoresheet, after all. But Chelsea are a harder team than they were when BenÍtez chessed them out of things in 2005. And perhaps crucially, Chelsea have a classic English centre forward in the form of his life.

Well, to be fair, Didier Drogba is from the Ivory Coast, and he is rather more than your traditional blunt instrument. But it is his love of battle rather than his skills that dominate.

Above all else, he is a man of much force who revels in all the physical battles of penalty-area life. And it was Drogba’s explosive run as Chelsea broke from defence that gave them the lead: a perfectly timed pass allowing Joe Cole to make decisive contact.

The English tradition is to mock continental goalkeepers for their failure to deal with crosses. But Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Petr Cech, though a Czech, has no problem in that direction and once again, he pulled out a save that Gordon Banks would have been pleased with to keep out a fizzing low drive from Gerrard.

It was a deeply English vignette. Both managers have, it seemed, used their cosmopolitan natures, set out to construct sides of a kind of super-Englishness: the logical, multilingual extension to the deepest ideas of what English football is all about.

That makes passion the most important ingredient of all, and Chelsea fear the passion of the Liverpool crowd that brought about their defeat on that soul-searching occasion of two years ago. They desperately wanted another goal as insurance for the second leg; but not at the expense of conceding one. Like their opponents, they were caught between ambition and caution. It reminded you of God knows how many England national sides we have watched over the years.

So near you can almost taste it . . . knowing that one small slip could lose everything. Thus these managers acted out their game plans of caginess and caution. But the old football saying is true: the teams do reflect the managers. It is just that BenÍtez and Mourinho are far, far more similar than they are different. The football proves it.