WELL, WHY ELSE SIGN A £24 MILLION striker if not to give you the upper hand? Still, if you were playing Monopoly with Didier Drogba, you might feel the urge to check that he has not sneaked a couple of extra hotels on to the board. He embodies the player for whom gamesmanship has become an instinct, so inculcated that it is natural. On Saturday he admitted — fleetingly — that blue is the colour, cheating is the game.

“Sometimes I dive, sometimes I stay up,” he said, swiftly backtracking: “I don’t dive, I play my game.” Did the limitations of Drogba’s English cause him to say something he did not mean, or did he perform a volte face when he realised that he had made a PR blunder? It is hard to imagine, given the attention on the issue in recent weeks, that he does not know the verb “to dive ”.

This was one of his best games for Chelsea, though injury-hit Manchester City were ordinary opponents. His power seemed controlled, he was creative and the first goal was excellent, a dance around Sylvain Distin then a thumping shot past David James. In celebration he stroked the Premier League badge on his arm, a gesture presumably intended to suggest that Chelsea will win the Barclays Premiership again rather than a portent as to which body part he would use to help to score the second.

When he went down with a genuine eye injury at the end, his reputation meant sympathy was limited. It did not help that he collapsed as if Richard Dunne had just run him over with a combine harvester. “Maybe his studs aren’t the best,” Stuart Pearce, the City manager, said.

The Ivory Coast forward admitted that his second goal, in which the assistant referee failed to notice Drogba controlling a cross using his right arm before he fired in from close range, was handball. “But it’s a part of the game,” he said. “If Man City score like this, nobody speaks. Because everybody wants to make (a fuss) about Chelsea . . . I think it means we are the best.”

Kneecapping the successful when they stand at their tallest is a traditional English pastime. Chelsea are entitled to argue that because of their unique wealth, they were resented even before they were successful. Arsenal and Manchester United had to cope with carping when they were English football’s best teams, though much of it emanated from each other.

Even when Arsenal bewitched with the beauty of their football in their Invincibles phase, their ill-discipline was not ignored. When who wins is no longer the story, how they win becomes the issue and this would be true whether it is Chelsea or Cheltenham Town romping clear at the top of the Premiership.

Distin and Kiki Musampa were booked after the second goal for protesting as City players surrounded the officials and waved their arms like City traders: a tactic that seemed to work for Fulham last week when Mike Dean reversed his initial decision to allow another strike from Drogba scored with the aid of a hand.

When Distin approached Rob Styles at half-time to put his point across forcefully, but not abusively, the referee gave the defender a second yellow card for refusing to give him the ball, one handling offence he did notice. Officials have understandably developed a siege mentality because of the repeated excesses of braying gangs of players.

Still, this was a small-minded decision that was a direct consequence of the earlier big mistake. Perhaps there has been a recent Fifa directive compelling referees to punish players who wag their fingers in a Gallic fashion. Pearce wryly suggested that Styles should “get his own ball”. Pearce’s attitude towards referees is a breath of fresh air in the fug of post-match halitosis by bitter managers. “He made honest decisions all afternoon,” he said. Honestly, though, two were poor.