Can Chelsea emulate the boys of '55?

Taking charge at Chelsea, he immediately put on a pinstripe suit and grew strangely subdued. But he knew what he wanted, to have Chelsea taken seriously.

One of the first things he did was to have the image of a Chelsea Pensioner taken off the club's match programme; they would be known as The Pensioners no longer.

Then he set about rebuilding the side with players from the lower leagues. The Championship-winning team had two inside forwards bought from the Third Division South; John McNichol, signed from Brighton in August 1952 for £15,000, and Les Stubbs from Southend United, who also cost five figures in the following December.

Probably the most inspired acquisition of all was of the 18-year-old left winger Frank Blunstone, from Crewe Alexandra of the Third Division North, who in no time at all would be playing for England.

He arrived in February, 1953, the same year Derek Saunders, redhaired and reliable, a quietly effective left-half and captain, came from amateurs Walthamstow Avenue for nothing. He didn't miss a league game in the Championship season.

The same club provided the British Olympic international winger, Jim Lewis Jnr. Seamus O'Connell, a blond inside-left, like Lewis, still an amateur, had played for Bishop Auckland.

There were veterans such as Ron Greenwood, the future West Ham and England manager, who had 21 league games that season at centre-half, and John Harris, now a right-back, who had been the centre-half before him.

Ken Armstrong, a Yorkshire-born right-half, had once filled in at centre forward. But now the position was splendidly taken by Roy Bentley, the one outstanding talent in the team, and England's striker in the ill-fated 1950 World Cup Finals, scorer of 22 of Chelsea's 81 league goals, in that celebrated season. He came in 1948 from Newcastle United for £11,000.

After a hectic start to that season, a match one still remembers when Chelsea lost 6-5 at home to Manchester United, they settled down to take the title with 52 points, four ahead of Wolves, Portsmouth and Sunderland.

They should have gone on to contest the first ever European Cup, but their Chairman Joe Mears, also President of the Football League, was bullied out of it by the League's xenophobic secretary Alan Hardaker.

The Championship triumph was quite a contrast with the immediate post-war years. When football officially restarted in the 1946/47 season, Chelsea fielded the glittering inside forward trio of Walker-Lawton-Goulden, which looked likely to win trophies galore.

Lawton, signed from Everton for £11,000 in 1945, was the prolific England centre-forward, unrivalled in the air. Walker was a Scottish legend. When Scotland were short of shirts during the Second World War he once provided all 10.

Goulden, from West Ham United, scored a spectacular goal for England when they thrashed Germany 6-3 in Berlin in 1938.

But a law of diminishing returns seemed not for the first time to be in operation. The famous trio had their great days, but not a title was won.

Nor was it between the wars, despite the array of costly stars who came to Stamford Bridge.

Two of them, Alex Jackson and Hughie Gallacher, had been members of the rampant Wembley Wizards, the Scotland team which thrashed England there 5-1 in 1928. Jackson, the tallest member of that attack at 5ft 7in, scored three of the goals.

Gallacher, a hugely skillful little centre-forward, frequently maltreated and provoked by opposing centre-halves, was previously the idol of Newcastle United.

He was a notorious drinker. The story goes that the players of a team due to play Chelsea the next day at The Bridge were walking along nearby Kings Road on a Friday evening when a man was thrown out of a pub which they were passing and lay prone on the pavement.

To their amazement, they saw it was Gallacher. The following afternoon, he ran them ragged.

In more recent times, the tendency has been to import expensive players from abroad; Ruud Gullit, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink,Gianfranco Zola.

Yet go back some 30 years and you find that two of the finest players in the club's history, Peter Osgood and Alan Hudson, were both developed at Stamford Bridge as, subsequently, was Ray Wilkins.

There might be a moral there.