One of those typical 1-0 Chelsea wins. We weren’t playing our best football. But we know how to get three points with as much as we can do. Pompey played well but I won’t say that they deserved a point or something.

Unfortunately, I could not follow the match as much as I would have like to. I was watching it live in a pub but there were too many disturbances, some constant and some intermittent, which impacted my enjoying the match and the post-match analysis I thought of writing. So, I’d write as briefly as possible.

I thought Chelsea were not at their best and it was Pompey all over the first half. We were a bit all over the place in the first 30 minutes or so. It was even a worrying sight at some point of time. Something has happened to Lampard since I wrote this post. He has now scored fours goals in four matches (England included).

lampard_ports.JPG

As always, our second half was much improved. We had a lot of chances in the second half to finish the game off but some kind of lethargy in front of the goal meant we were still on a thin lead. Harry Redknapp took some real risk in making attacking substitutions to put pressure on Chelsea. In the last quarter hour, we slowed down a bit and were content to close down the match for a 1-0 win. Can’t blame them especially when the end result has us leading the table.

Jose says that he expected a not-so-spectacular performance from the Chelsea team due to the fatigue of the mid-week international fixtures:

I don’t like to play after national team weeks. The players go there, play, some come happy, some unhappy, some train hard, some didn’t train, some travel on Thursday just to train yesterday. I cannot train with the team, I cannot prepare the team. The concentration is not the same and the way we are prepared is not the same. It happens like this four out of five international weeks. This is the kind of week where I say the team and play the game. I normally organise my teams from the first day of the week so if next week we play a bad game and we don’t get a good result I will be very frustrated because next week I will work all week for 90 minutes. This week I didn’t work, I was just waiting for them to arrive. This week I am not frustrated because I was waiting for something like this.

I think also the weather was not a help, very, very hot, surprisingly hot and I could see the first half was very difficult for the players to play intense. No pressure on the ball, people thinking slowly on the pitch, I had to shake them at half-time to improve them in the second half but at the end of the day I can say I’m happy with the points, I’m happy with the fact we are top of the league, but I want to play better.

Here are the match reports from various sites:

Sky Sports report
BBC Sports report
Official Chelsea website report

And have a look at this nice article on Chelseablog about ‘spoilt fans’.

I should say there’s nothing much to complain about at the moment. We’re doing well, getting the goals, Lampard can’t stop scoring, Terry is back, Essien will be in midfield, Pizarro and Malouda clicking well, SWP seems to be rejuvenated and Drogba remains the Drogba we know. If you still have complaints, just have a look at the league table and see how we compare with the table leaders. Oh wait, you can’t, it’s Chelsea who’s on top!