Last game of the season, the top two divided by such a slender margin that if they achieve different results, they could trade places by the end of the day. The country’s wealthiest club has the trickier fixture, but set about its business bullishly: one goal ahead almost instantly, three up within 25 minutes. There’s no panic yet from their fellow title-chasers. Their assignment should be simpler: as long as they gain a point, goal difference over these 90 minutes will have no bearing. Then Michael Ballack scores and an entire season’s momentum turns 180 degrees.

This may or may not become part of the storyline of the 2007-08 Premier League denouement, but it was the tale of the 2000 Bundesliga cliffhanger. Ballack, then a 23-year-old rising star in German football, had galvanised an impressive charge to the summit of the league by Bayer Leverkusen. Going into the last day, they held the advantage over Bayern Munich, who were at home to Werder Bremen. Leverkusen had to travel to Bavaria, to play lowly Unterhaching.

Even if Bayern won, Leverkusen required only a draw. Ballack was given a more advanced role than usual. The trouble started with Ballack’s goal: it went in at the wrong end.

He has achieved a great deal since that May afternoon, although the Bundesliga’s most famous Devon Loch moment of the past decade – Leverkusen lost 2-0, Bayern won 3-1 and a motorbike courier was obliged to dash between two venues with the Bundesliga Shield at the final whistle – still has his image strongly attached to it. “I never looked at it as my own goal having lost us the title,” Ballack recalls, “but it was a bitter moment. I’m not the type to go into lots of self-doubt. That’s the good thing about football. It’s always moving on.”

For Ballack, it would move on in a series of rather eerie déjà vu moments. In 2002 Leverkusen also led the Bundesliga entering the final stages. With three fixtures remaining, they held a five-point lead over Borussia Dortmund, had a place in the Champions League semi-finals, where they would defeat Manchester United, and had reached the German Cup final. By the time Ballack scored twice in the season’s final league fixture, Leverkusen had fluffed it again, taking three points from a possible nine and finishing second. The joke, “Leverkusen? You mean Neverkusen” gained currency.

In the European Cup final they would finish second to Real Madrid. And in the German Cup final? Second. Ballack went on to the World Cup, became Germany’s outstanding outfield player there and contributed the semi-final goal that took them to the final. Moments before that goal against South Korea, he collected a yellow card that suspended him from the meeting with Brazil, where Germany finished . . . second.

Domestic gold medals came his way once Ballack had moved to Bayern. Arriving at Chelsea, he joined England’s champions. In his debut season they finished second. His next season has had a distinct character. He missed most of the first half of it, injured, but in the pursuit of the senior prizes in England and Europe, Ballack has turned galvaniser again. He has three goals from Chelsea’s past two Premier League victories; he scored what was in effect the winner in the Champions League quarter-final against Fenerbahce, in a competition for which Chelsea had not even registered him in September.

That curious episode, when the club submitted to Uefa a squad list excluding Germany’s captain for the group stage of the tournament, seems distant now, but not quite reconciled in Ballack’s mind. “I could have played, but Jose [Mourinho] decided not to put me in,” he maintains. Interpretations then ranged from Chelsea in effect putting Ballack up for sale, to his being disciplined for having taken medical advice elsewhere on his ankle injury.

When he returned to Chelsea’s first team, eight months after limping out of action, Mourinho was no longer making the decisions. Among the first moves Avram Grant made concerning Ballack was to award him the temporary captaincy while several senior players were out injured. Ballack’s impact seemed to earn it. He scored in his first Premier League match of the season, the 4-4 draw with Aston Villa, and in the New Year derby at Fulham, and struck the winner against Reading.

“As soon as I came back from the injury, I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I felt,” he says. “I had a couple of good games straight away and that’s thanks to the physios.” Invited to spread his gratitude towards the head coach, Ballack says: “Avram Grant has done a good job. It was always going to be hard to take over from Mourinho because the fans loved him. Any coach would have found it difficult.”

Asked by a reporter from the German magazine Der Spiegel to wonder if a team with all Chelsea’s talents could succeed, no matter who was the coach, Ballack replies: “Any team who did that would have a lot of class.” Asked whether Grant is merely the malleable extension of the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, he makes the point that “if that was the case, then he would be letting Andriy Shevchenko play, because he was Abramovich’s buy”.

Shevchenko and Ballack were once bracketed together, the two high-profile signings from the summer of 2006, a pair who have not worked for Chelsea. Shevchenko remains a marginal contributor; Ballack is now undroppable. He is winning applause at home, too. A suspicion in Germany that he has less of the cut of a leader than some of his predecessors who have captained the national team – that he lacks the bearing of a Franz Beckenbauer or the loudmouth determination of a Lothar Matthaus – has had to withstand some significant challenges.

Converting the penalty against Manchester United that took Chelsea even on points with the defending champions was one such event. “Cool,” cooed the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. It was his second goal of the afternoon and won the match with four minutes left. “I am used to pressure situations,” he explains. “It wasn’t a problem.”

Will he stay at Chelsea beyond the Champions League final in Moscow? “Why would you think otherwise?” he asks. He and his partner of 10 years, Simone, are apparently settled in London. “I am happy. I’m playing well and I want to win the Champions League here. I’ve waited six years to play in another one.”

And no, the scenario of 2002 has not awoken any ghosts in Ballack’s memory. “This Chelsea are much stronger than that Leverkusen team,” he says. “In that season we were underdogs against Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the Champions League and underdogs against United in the semis. Chelsea are different. There will be no clear favourites in Moscow and we are all back from injuries, all looking good, all looking strong.”

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Omens for Chelsea

THE GOOD Since February 2004, Chelsea are unbeaten at home in 81 league matches, winning 60. They have played Bolton 17 times in the Premier League, winning 10 and losing only three games

THE BAD In the past seven seasons, there’s been a symmetry to teams winning Spanish and English titles. When Real Madrid won La Liga (2001, 2003, 2007), United won the Premier League; when Valencia (2002, 2004) were champions in Spain, Arsenal were top in England; Barcelona and Chelsea both claimed titles in 2005 and 2006. Ominously, Madrid are champions this year

TV match Chelsea v Bolton
Today, Sky Sports 2,
2.45pm, kick-off 3pm;

Match of the Day, BBC1, 10.20pm

Ex-Spurs boss Jol back as Hamburg manager

MARTIN JOL is back in management after agreeing to take charge of Hamburg SV next season. Jol, sacked by Tottenham Hotspur in October despite achieving consecutive top-five finishes, has shaken hands on a two-year deal to manage the German giants – contrary to reports that suggested he was going to Manchester City. While two clubs in the top half of the Premier League are understood to have approached Jol, and he declined the chance to take up jobs in international football and with PSV Eindhoven, Hamburg represent the kind of challenge he was seeking. Hamburg, fourth in the Bundesliga, need just a point from their last game, at home to Karlsruhe, to secure a Uefa Cup slot and their average attendance of 50,200 is the 12th highest in Europe.

Jol is now the first man to manage in the Dutch, English and German top flights as well as play there. The appointment will be confirmed by the supervisory committee of local business people who oversee the club at their next meeting.

Jol’s first challenge will be to keep hold of his star player, Rafael Van Der Vaart, who is a target for Real Madrid and has also been linked with Chelsea. Jol rates Van Der Vaart, alongside Werder Bremen’s Diego, as “the best No 10 in Germany” and the Dutch midfielder carries a price tag of about £20m.