Giles Smith: Standing to reason

A lot can happen in the space of 10 days, so it’s worth briefly recapping the events that occurred following December 6th – which, you will no doubt recall, was that extraordinary, unprecedented and, in some quarters, even dumbfounding day in the 2014/15 season when Chelsea finally got round to losing a Premier League match.

The ensuing Wednesday, with the shockwaves still being felt around the country after our defeat by the odd goal in three away at Newcastle, and with some observers rather eagerly wondering whether this would be the point at which it would ‘all unravel’, we returned to Stamford Bridge to beat Sporting Lisbon 3-1 in a match with nothing riding on it from our point of view (and everything riding on it from the point of view of our opponent’s), merely confirming our qualification for the knock-out stages of the Champions League as group winners, yet confirming it rather emphatically, none the less.

Then, the following Saturday, we played Hull at home and, without breaking very much in the way of sweat other than to jump out of the way of various scything tackles which might otherwise have done certain members of our squad lasting mischief, won 2-0 to maintain our three-point lead at the top of the table.

And then, on Tuesday, we went to Derby where, in the tipping rain, we scored a pair of goals (Eden Hazard’s slapshot, Filipe Luis’s free-kick in the form of a 24-gun salute) which have probably already burned their way onto the showreel for Chelsea TV’s Goal of the Season contest. In the process, we beat the recent Championship leaders 3-1, and advanced in an admirably unflustered manner into the semi-finals of the Capital One Cup.

Accordingly, our record so far this season, accounting for all competitions, reads as follows: Played 25, Lost 1, Drawn 5, Won 19.

Okay, so you could argue that it’s not the form of Real Madrid, whose unblemished run of victories currently stands at 21. But then, unlike Real, we’re not playing in Spain and a high proportion of our matches have brought us up against opponents who are actually quite good. So I would suggest the achievement easily stands comparison, and is possibly even superior in terms of durability, consistency under pressure and… well, winning when it’s really quite hard to do so.

And the loss to Newcastle? Well, it doesn’t seemed to have altered the team’s course very much, by the look of the intervening fortnight. Defeat, you will hear people say, is the furnace in which character is forged - which always sounds grand, although it has never seemed to me a particularly strong argument against avoiding defeat wherever possible and simply deciding to take the hit, character-wise.

Nevertheless, on those inevitable occasions when defeat simply can’t be avoided (up at St James’ Park, for instance, when, convincingly pressing for an equaliser, you’ve just hit the post, only for the opposition to go scampering up the other end, capitalise on a once-in-a-lifetime error by your centre-back and double their lead), the art, clearly, then lies in bouncing back in such a way as to minimise the defeat’s effects.

And three successive victories in three elaborately different sets of circumstance, does go a long way towards reducing it and perhaps even covering its traces over completely. In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but, a fortnight on, it’s almost like Newcastle never happened.

The two teams we ‘didn’t want’, according to all the analysts, were Juventus and Paris St-Germain. And, when the draw was made, we didn’t get Juventus. But we did get PSG. So, to summarise, we didn’t get what we wanted.

Really? There was a false logic in operation there, surely. Being the two biggest sides that we could possibly have been matched with at this stage of the tournament, and representing measurably the two biggest threats to our continuing presence in Europe, Juventus and PSG were, I would suggest, EXACTLY the kind of sides that we would have hoped to be drawn against. And therefore, like lucky children at Christmas, we did get what we wished for, after all (although, arguably, Juventus would have represented the stiffer challenge, so Santa could have been even kinder).

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Why be in the Champions League in the first place if, as soon as the competition gets serious, you’re going to cringe and hide and hope to get lucky? After all, there’s plenty of opportunity to cringe and hide and hope to get lucky every year in the Capital One Cup and the FA Cup. We certainly don’t need the Champions League for that. On the contrary, in that context the only sensible post-Christmas attitude is ‘bring on the big guns’.

There’s a time and a place for playing BATE Borisov, in my opinion, and it’s October in the Europa League. Come February, on the other hand, and the knock-out stages of Europe’s elite-level cup competition, you instinctively want it large. You want a big, glossy name on your ticket and the prospect of a big, glossy night ahead of you. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?

Remember, too, that we didn’t win the Champions League by getting soft draws against Monaco. We won it by taking down a then formidable Napoli side (who brought a 3-1 lead into the second leg), seeing off the legendary and storied Benfica, barging aside an ultra-sophisticated Barcelona and vanquishing the mighty Bayern Munich who (and this should never be under-emphasised) were actually at home in the final, which is about as soft as a draw gets at that stage.

There was immense and eternal pride to be found in that – as, I would suggest, there might not have been (or not to quite the same extent) if our path to permanent glory had gone via Trabzonspor, Dnipro, Red Bull Salzburg and Arsenal at the Emirates.

Similarly the sympathy one has heard being voiced for Manchester City, who have hopped from a frying-pan group-stage into the fire of a two-legged tie against Barca, is entirely misplaced. In the absence of a frying pan, the fire is exactly where anyone who buys into the competition’s true spirit wants to be, so that’s a proper draw, right there. True, it may also be the end of City’s Champions League campaign. But there’s a nobility to be found even in that, because you might as well go down dizzy and in flames trying to contain Lionel Messi as go out on goal difference to Shakhtar Donetsk (no disrespect).

Anyway, may it be the same story for us this time as it was in 2012, or a very similar one: big guns blazing (and preferably getting blazed), all the way. That, after all, is what it’s for. And for everything else, there’s the Capital One.

On the topic of which, congratulations to Liverpool on that shock victory at Bournemouth last night. That was a result which nobody saw coming, and all credit to Brendan Rodgers’s men for having the self-belief, even when under siege in the second half, to ignore the doubters and produce it. 

Note, too, that not everyone has written off Liverpool at this point. Indeed, it’s a mark of the respect Bournemouth were still able to show the struggling Premier League side that, on the night, they put out a side which was only a few players short of full strength.

After that came the draw for the semi-finals, performed, with the traditional sense of balance and objectivity for which televised football is increasingly famous, by two ex-Liverpool players. It was Graeme Souness and Jamie Redknapp who withdrew the balls of destiny from what seemed to be a black motorcycle helmet, possibly requisitioned from a passing pizza delivery man. (You use what you can get your hands on, I guess.) And accordingly, it’s those two who were responsible for getting their former club a tie against a big team in the next round – namely us. But it promises to be quite exciting for us, too, and I'm sure we'll get up for it as best we can.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.

Falling Into Place

I suggested last week that losing to Newcastle away was not all doom and gloom as it could be the beginning of better things and last week the team showed that it was ready to begin another winning streak.

Right now it stands at P 2 W 2 D 0 L 2

4 nil and 2 nil wins at home is hardly big news compared to some of our best performances this season but these kind of results is what breeds the kind of confidence needed to start another run.

It looks like everything is falling into place for us just at the right time. We have deliberately lost to lift the unneeded pressure of the boys and whether by coincidence or some twist of faith, we've managed to let 3 of our most influential players to serve their time for suspensions to get them available for the most busy and exciting period of the season.

Diego Costa was first then Matic against Newcastle. Our midfield maestro and assist leader  in the BPL Cesc Fabregas was also suspended for the Hull City game. Now all of them will be available for the festive games which comes almost every 2 days till mid - January next year.

With the team now officially participating in 4 competitions after the FA cup draw it was lovely to see the manager mix up the team and for us to witness a debut for Rueben Loftus-Cheek. But more importantly, it was great to see them produce the kind of performance they did on Wednesday in the CL.

Schurlle for instance had been hitting low keys for the team this season since he came back from the World Cup but he looked himself on Wednesday and capped a fine performance with a goal. All the players are staying sharp and ready to compete for the team and that can only be to the benefit of the team.

When Chelsea eliminated PSG from the Champions league last season their official twitter handle wrote that they shall be back and lo and behold, here they are. Right in the middle of the road blocking our path to CL glory. But I bet they didn't put into consideration the fact that they will be meeting a much improved and super high on confidence Chelsea.

They really put up a fight the last time beating us 3-1 in Paris and we could only go through on goal difference putting our vastly superior experience in the competition to use. But things are different now. We play at a different stage of the competition with a better team and against David Luiz whom we will love to beat. So if PSG tells us they are back our answer is simple.

Bring it on.

Giles Smith - The Truth Is Out There

It wasn’t only a sprightly performance that caught columnist and season ticket holder Giles Smith’s eye as he watched last night’s win…

Remember losing? I’d almost completely forgotten about it. And not surprisingly really. I’m pretty sure that the last time it happened, milk still came in glass bottles.

But that was before last Saturday, of course, and that slightly surprising result at Newcastle, the pointless aftermath of which, inevitably, brought back a few distant memories, not all of them entirely pleasant. That said, once the initial gloom had begun to lift,

I personally was quite relieved to have got a defeat on the board at long last. The talk of a possible ‘invincible’ season (none of it ever coming from Chelsea fans, incidentally) had started up, ridiculously, as early as October, and was just beginning to get irksome. Given a little longer, it clearly had the potential to become a major distraction, possibly even a ruinous one from the point of view of our greater aims.

Going through a league season undefeated, quietly leaving aside defeats in cup competitions, and then awarding yourself the label ‘invincible’ – correct me if I’m wrong, but this was never part of the gameplan for 2014/15, which set its sights on more dignified things, such as trying to win all the available competitions, rather than on a nerdy, fact-checker’s interest in unblemished records. It would have been entirely unrealistic in any case.

I realise that Arsenal did it in 2003/04, but the Premier League was a less complicated place in those days, bearing no resemblance to the collection of variously terrifying banana skins which constitute the top flight of English football today.

Indeed, back then, the Premiership was only just beginning to emerge from a period in which a drawn-out two-club stranglehold (Arsenal and Manchester United) had drawn unfavourable and even mocking comparisons with the situation in Scottish football.

In any case, let’s face it, never losing leads only to stagnation and complacency. Better, surely, to enjoy the rejuvenating effect of the occasional (preferably extremely occasional) defeat and convert it, say, into a spritely, born-again 3-1 victory over Sporting Lisbon in the following match (impressively spritely, given that the match was, from our players' point of view, a dead rubber) and, for preference, something similar at home to Hull on Saturday.

Remember bouncing back? It follows logically that that, too, is a distant memory round these parts. But I don’t think any of us would mind being reminded.

For a very long time now this column has been interested in discovering what those additional UEFA goal-line officials actually do of an evening. I suppose, in a way, it’s become a bit of an obsession – a life’s work, you could almost say.

But it’s just a feeling we have that, if we ever did find out what officials number five and six are up to out there, standing quite near the goals on these European evenings, and if we wrote those findings up in words right here, it would give us the satisfaction of feeling that this column handmade a contribution, however modest, to the sum of human knowledge.

Because nobody else seems to know what those people are for either. This is clearly a new frontier for scientific understanding and whoever gets there first is going to be acclaimed for all time as a pioneer and ground-breaker – the person who first cracked the code and explained to the world the point of the goal line official.

Unfortunately, despite having devoted many hours of close scrutiny to those extra assistants, and having thought extremely hard about their potential function at every moment available, the most plausible explanation we have been able to find for them up to now is: ‘somewhere to hang your coat.’

Which isn’t bad, at this stage of the investigation as early conclusions go. It may well be part of the truth. But my instincts as an experimental scientist tell me it’s not the whole truth, which is what we’re really after.

You’ll understand how excited we became last night, then, during the second half, when – in a development which we believe was unprecedented, certainly in our own experience – the goal line official at the Shed End actively summoned the referee over to him in order to have some kind of consultation.

This was rare: you very rarely see those extra people make a meaningful move or communicate with anyone else connected with the match in any way at all. This has led in some quarters to the theory that the goal line officials are, in fact, cyborgs, sent from another planet. (For the record, we don’t entirely dismiss this theory. But we’d need to see quite a lot more proof before we completely signed up to it.)

Yet, just before Sporting could take the corner kick which had been awarded to them, the extra assistant distinctly appeared to call the referee to him, causing the game to be held up while the two of them put their heads together on the goal line and clearly had some kind of conversation.

At that point, those of us watching seemed potentially to be on the verge of an important breakthrough – witnessing some sort of decisive intervention on the goalline official’s part which might explain their purpose more generally and why UEFA goes to the trouble of flying them all the way from Norway (in last night’s case), putting them in a hotel, feeding them, issuing them with uniforms, etc.

Alas, what happened next was… well, nothing.

The conversation went on for quite a long time. The players stood and waited. At the end of the conversation, the referee trotted back to his position on the edge of the penalty area. He then waved for the delayed corner to be taken. He didn’t talk to anyone; he didn’t noticeably address anything that the goalline official might have drawn to his attention. It was if the exchange had never happened.

No wiser, then. No closer to solving the mystery. Still entirely in the dark, in fact. For all we know (and for all the difference it made), the goalline official called the referee over because he had just remembered the punchline to a joke that he had started to tell in the courtesy car on the way to the ground.

But that’s not to say that we’re giving up now. Far from it. We scientists don’t do that. We know the truth may be hard to arrive at. But we push on towards it anyway.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.

Stronger and Tougher

I was at a friend's wedding on Saturday when the match was being played so I could only check updates via various social media and on livescore.com.

The debate and the discussions at the wedding grounds after the match made me realise that almost all of the oppositions never really liked the idea of us going unbeaten. The most obvious reason being that its Chelsea. Anything good about Chelsea leaves a bad taste in the mouths of all non - Chelsea fans and going unbeaten in a season will be the worst taste.

The second being that with Arsenal almost trophy-handicapped and mostly  4th best in the league over a long period of time it was only humane to let them cling on the last modicum of superiority that they have or had depending on which part of the century you are from.

It wasn’t the best result for me, or the team, on a rather delightful day for me but come to think of it, it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the team.

We lost to a Newcastle team that has been on up for some time now at one of our most difficult grounds to play in without our best midfield enforcer in the person of Nemanja Matic. Even Jose Mourinho has not won there on 5 occasions now and almost always the story is the same. We play well but create few chances and are finished off with some fine finishing.

If any team deserved to beat us for the first time this season it was Newcastle. They are not direct title rivals and neither are they London rivals. There is not much animosity between the fans either and we played them at a very good time in the season so no harm done there.

This match, however, gave us 2 things.

First, it eased the pressure on the team. Everybody in the media were so interested in this unbeaten run that it was neck breaking and exhausting and it put so much pressure on the team. Every opposing team prepared so much to have the game of their lives to be able to break it and this made it very difficult for the team.

Well its broken now so you can all relax now and play against us like you play the rest of the teams. Big teams are supposed to be able to handle such pressure but it is always fun to play with that freedom when nothing is at stake, except for the Premier league.

Secondly, it confirmed what I have always been saying that the most important player in this team now is Nemanja Matic. Anybody who knew how important he was to the team would not be surprised that we lost our first match in his absence. His work in putting out opposition fires is so vital and no 1 does it better than him. Mikel did his best but its not easy to command the middle like him. Its good news to have him available for the next games.

We are still 3 pts clear at the top of the table. This team will come stronger and tougher from this defeat. I've always said that the league is ours to lose this season and I still stand by it. We have everything we need to see things through so unless we are hit with the worst kind of hard luck we should be fine.

With the season building up some steam it is a massive blow to Manchester City to lose their best forward and leading goalscorer in the BPL. Aguero's scoring rate is impressive and has been the difference for the team this season both at home and in Europe. His injury is not that surprising considering his history with it and his absence will almost likely hand the title to Chelsea. City has no potent replacement upfront and Chelsea fans will not be feeling sorry at all.

I've always believed that one of the luckiest managers in the world is Arsene Wenger. With the board members of his club, their playing philosophies, the fans and even the players it looks like Arsenal was tailor - made for him. With everything that has been happening on and off the pitch I guess the last thing we all expected was to see the fans fight themselves over him.

The club can endure trophy hunger with him, no Champions league with him, unimpressive transfers and even his losing streak to Mourinho with him. But 1 thing the club cant survive is to lose their supporters. No matter how important you are to a club non can survive without their supporters. Master Wenger must really get his act together or risk leaving his beloved Arsenal like Rafael Benitez left Chelsea. And that is even if he can win something in his last season.

Giles Smith - Something Old Something New

Some old rituals never lose their magic. It doesn’t matter how many times they come around, nor how same-y they are in essence, they still gladden the heart and charm us all over again. Christmas, for example. And not losing to Tottenham at home in the league.

As people are forever pointing out, the last time Tottenham beat Chelsea at the Bridge in a league game, Gary Lineker was still a footballer and you could get one of his packets of Walkers crisps for a penny-ha’penny and still have change for the trolley-bus home.

And, of course, human nature being what it is, every year you go along to the ground thinking, ‘Will this, finally, be the one? Will this, at last, be the time that Spurs end this extraordinary, unprecedented run of fruitlessness and, for the first time since everyone in the crowd wore hats and stood around in black and white, go home with the points?’ And every time it isn’t. Last night being no exception.

It almost makes you feel sorry for our north London neighbours. They aren’t just playing us in this fixture, they are also playing the history of the British Isles. Sure enough, last night they started enthusiastically enough but within 20 minutes or so they were suddenly 2-0 and 24 years down. 

That’s always going to be dispiriting. And long may it continue. Same goes for Christmas.

How was the new light-show for you? Just before the players emerged from the tunnel last night, the floodlights were dipped, the hoardings around the pitch glowed bright blue and a heart-beat came pumping through the PA system. All courtesy of those new LED light bulbs of ours, which can be flicked on and off, unlike the old ones, which were powered by a complex system of hamsters on treadmills and therefore took a little while to warm up.

Maybe you had to be there. The thing is, if I had seen the plan written down on a piece of paper beforehand, I would probably have thought it was a terrible idea and turned my nose up against it as high as my nose would go. Artificial atmosphere in the stadium? Surely that’s a close relative of piping in music after goals, which would have to sit extremely high on the list of the very worst ideas that anyone ever had in the vicinity of a football ground.

As it happened, though, I thought it was brilliant - an enhancer rather than a detractor, a complement to the atmosphere that was already there, and probably quite a kick for the players, who got to walk out into these theatrical pools of light with the rest of the ground in darkness.

Shades, in fact, of the eerie aftermath of our 2005 Carling Cup victory in Cardiff, where the lights were dimmed for the trophy presentation and which I can still become quite shuddery thinking about even now.

So I’m all in favour of this new night-game curtain-raiser. It’s probably against Champions League rules, so I don’t know when we’ll see it again. But I’m already looking forward to it.

No music when we score, though. We must never let that happen. It’s up to all of us to unite against the notion if anyone so much as mentions it.

According to a theory advanced by the BBC Sport website the other day, it’s all the Champions League’s fault. The 0-0 draw at Sunderland, I mean. Keen-eyed statisticians noted that each of the three matches in which our team has failed to take the full complement of points on offer in a Premier League fixture this season has occurred during the weekend directly following a match in Europe. The conclusion was drawn that post-European fatigue must have been a factor. Well, maybe. On the other hand, we have played in the Champions League five times so far.

Which means (if I’m doing the maths correctly) that, as well as the three occasions on which there was a subsequent faltering, there were two occasions on which there wasn’t.

Indeed, on one of those two occasions when there wasn’t, we returned from Europe, went up to Liverpool about 10 minutes later, in a match which the schedulers weren’t even prepared to postpone until Sunday, or even Saturday evening, in accordance with the normal courtesy extended to Champions League contenders, and won 2-1.

And even though beating Liverpool at Anfield doesn’t quite bring the glowing sense of achievement that it once did, in the days when the coalman still drove around on a horse and cart and when Liverpool were still a big club whose ground was a genuinely intimidating place to go, that still felt like a decent enough achievement at the time, in the circumstances and given that some of our players were still clearing customs three minutes before the game kicked off. On the other of those two occasions, by the way, we came back from Lisbon to beat Arsenal at home. Again, I know: not the force they once were. But still not a bad result.

Also, let’s not forget that the places where we drew in the wake of European action this season were Manchester City, Manchester United and Sunderland. And okay, it might just about be reasonable to talk about ‘dropping points’ at the Stadium of Light, but surely it would be only patronising and presumptuous to speak of ‘dropping points’ at the Etihad and even at Old Trafford, which are places where a draw is a perfectly respectable outcome, and may even be regarded as a ‘point earned’.

Especially when your ‘point earned’ would have been three points if it hadn’t been for (respectively), an own goal by Frank Lampard and a desperate last-minute hack in the face of an unfortunately depleted defence by Robin van Persie.

Anyway, let’s say there is a recognisable phenomenon called ‘a Champions League hangover’; and let’s say our team has been in the grip of it on three out of five occasions so far this season. Even then it seems to me to be a reasonable trade-off.

Would you rather not be in Europe at all, like Manchester United, and 12 points clear at the top of the table, 16 points clear of the team in third place, and 19 points better off than Liverpool?

Or would you prefer to be (as we are) through to the qualifying stages of the Champions League, having finished top of the group with a game to spare, and ‘merely’ six points clear at the top of the table, 10 points clear of the team in third place and 13 points better off than Liverpool?

Surely any reasonable person has to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth and, accordingly, it’s the latter for me.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.

A Fair Point

One point gained or two points lost?

Depends on how you are looking at things.
This was the most nervous match that the team has played this season. These were the type of matches that Chelsea lost last season.

Chelsea actually lost at the Stadium of Light last season. It is a sign of how far this team has progressed that they were still able to dig in deep and keep their shape and composure to get the draw.

Both teams put in a very steady but feisty performance and each had a ball hit the post. Both clearly had their objectives and were playing to it. 1 point each seems like a fair results even though Chelsea will rue not creating enough chances.

The team is high on confidence and on a steady run and can have a go at any team in Europe right now but this draw could be the best thing to happen to them this season. There is nothing more demoralising than to fly so high into the sky and eventually get burned and drop to ground.

Such falls are hard to recover from. It is far better to get an improved results at your supposed "bogey" grounds and still learn the lesson that you are not untouchable so get your stuff together and go finish on a high.

The title is still ours to lose. Such is the competition in the BPL that we can afford to drop the odd points and let your opponents win but still stay ahead comfortably because they will eventually drop some points too.

Every team will drop points and Chelsea might not even go undefeated but in the end it will all depend on how tough the team is mentally to hold on to such a lead and in such circumstances we all trust Mourinho to get us there.

So we play our favourite team on Wednesdays night at home. They have become a bit stable in their last 2 matches after winning their Europa League match and also on Sunday with the last kick of the game.

They will be high on confidence and playing Chelsea in the position that they currently are is always extra motivation for them. Nothing will please our neighbours from North London than to be the first team to defeat us this season and also derail us on our title march.

Well the fun part is that nothing also pleases us more than when we beat up our favourite neighbours at Stamford Bridge.

Southampton put up a spirited fight in the 1st half but after losing Schneiderlin in the 2nd half to injury and playing without Cork to plug the midfield it was always going to be a tough battle keeping Lampard at bay.

Lampsy perfected the art of finding space from deep positions in the league and is a master of it. He did it to Chelsea and he can do it everyday. Its no wonder that Pelligrini wants to keep him beyond January. He's been a very valuable addition.

The race is heating up and Manuel Pelligrini seems up for a fight. That will only make the fight for the title more fun.

At least he did not do a Wenger and concede the title lost before christmas.