FULL TIME! Chelsea 2 - Lazio 1 Top of the group, as Sparta beat Besiktas 2-1 Chelsea 6 pts Lazio 4 pts Sparta Prague 4 pts Besiktas 3 pts
Home win against Sparta and an away point at either Lazio or Besiktas will see us through now. This was a fantastic win for the club.
A win there would indeed be the biz all right. However, i would be very happy with a point. Sparta at home will be a tell all game for us. Sidenote. Smug gooners will be a little bit quieter now....he he he
the evening standard had an interview with crespo and it mentioned that he missed training yesterday coz of a slight groin strain and that their baby didnt survive premature birth last week. didnt say though if he was going to be playing or not.
Well i hope its worth waiting for... good luck... do we need luck? espn... we are catching up with spuds posts... slowly but surely.. guddy..
Do you mean Soccernet? When i first posted on soccernet there were only 600 posts on the Chelsea forum.That was a few years ago now. Came here because of the trolling.
Overall exactly what I wanted to see from us tonight I did get to see the match on two hour tape delay. Here is my take from the TV: Although we were 0-1 down at the half, we outplayed them in the first half. We dominated possession for the first 30 minutes and looked really good passing but just lacked the final killer ball - they defended the box very well. We played with the diamond in midfield, Makelele at the back and Duff behind the strikers. It didn't work too bad but there were a bunch of times were Mutu ended up with the ball on the wing and Duff was hovering in the box - I would have thought we wanted the exact opposite. Johnson was rampant on the right wing, but may have ran himself ragged as he was at fault for leaving his man with an open header from about 10 yards that went straight across the goal mouth and was knocked in by Inzaghi. Looked like Gallas could have marked Inzaghi tighter as well but the ball should never have been allowed to come in from that angle anyway. We came out with no subs and the second half was more even than the first. Lampard's goal was a beauty, he nailed the bar with a screamer in the first half and this time Guddy pulled a ball back for him right at the top of the box that he one-time perfectly sliced into the upper right corner. Beauty of a goal. CR then brought on Gronks for Veron. With his first touch Gronks got to the byline and pulled the ball back to Mutu whose first shot was blocked but he nailed the rebound in. There was some bad blood at the end with Gronks and Cole each receiving a few cheap shots as they tried to run out the clock. Lazio was lucky not to have a few guys sent off in my opinion. Anyway, I thought we did everything we needed to do tonight, from keeping possession to defending well as a unit. I'd probably give JT man of the match, he was dominant at the back and made some crunching tackles. Carlo was excellent tonight as well, never putting a foot wrong. Guddy looked good as well, I'd really like to see him get a shot up front with Crespo - I think they'd be amazing together. With Duff giving the service from the wing. Bring on Man City, the defense will have its work cut out for them on the weekend, hopefully we'll put 4 past them to be sure.
Mutu again was back to his brilliant self. Evidence? The goal that he scored was again top class, not because it was beautiful but because he had used both feet again. The initial shot from the right foot rebounded off a defender and rolled back to his path.... se swivelled and then took a swipe at the ball with his left foot this time. Genuine genius in the six yard box.
No word on Crespo that I've read. I think Gudjohnsen is slowly getting back to his form of 2 seasons ago, at least with his movement and passing. There was one 2 on 2 breakaway where he tried to feed Mutu when he should have taken the shot, but otherwise his decisions were spot on. His eye for goal has not returned but hopefully it will soon. I can't fathom how we would sell this guy to a rival like, Man Utd, Man City, or the Toon. Hopefully those rumors are bunk. Besides his goal and a out-of-control run or two through the defense, I didn't see that much from Mutu yesterday. He floated in and out and while he is the type of player who can pop up out of nowhere and score a decisive winner, I think Crespo has a much better all-around game.
Re: No word on Crespo Well mst, that is the trouble with watching the game on TV you get a very narrow perspective. Mutu did an awful lot of work off the ball with some excellent blindside runs that were just not picked up by the defense. Unfortunately they were not picked up by our midfield either. I thought he did just as much work when Lazio had the ball. He is a real effort man. I agree with your earlier posts that Lazio were lucky to finish with 11 men. I can't understand how a player can strike another under the nose of the ref and not even get a yellow let alone a red card.