I pity Valencia. They are a very good team who are now in terrible form in domestic as well as european football. I wonder what would have been their mindset as they stepped onto the Stamford Bridge pitch. Pointless match for both teams. Atleast Chelsea did not have to travel, and could have used this match as a run-up to the Arsenal match. I don’t how motivated the Valencia players would have been as they had to travel all the way from Spain for this match. Of course, there is this UEFA cup spot but again, it’s just UEFA Cup spot. By the way, the next time Chelsea plays Valencia, I wonder who would David Villa be playing for!

I didn’t watch this match live. All that I hear is that we should have won by a margin but somehow we managed not to score. Valencia lacked motivation or interest with no one to inspire them (for what?). We fielded a pretty strong team with Essien, Lampard, Terry and Shevchenko. I wonder why Sheva had to subbed at the half time. He’s starting matches after a long time. He had started for the match against Sunderland and should start against Arsenal too. So I thought he’d get more playing minutes to keep himself sharp. Last thing I want to see is Sheva taking that extra second in which Toure nicks the ball.

The big pluses are the involvement of Petr Cech and Paulo Ferreira. Just when I’m gutted about not having Essien and Drogba for the Arsenal match, we’ve got Petr and Paulo back. That’s nice.

Avram said this after the match:

We want to be in the final. This is our target for the next years, but we want to do it this year. It was not important for qualification here but we wanted to play well and it was great football. We deserved 5-0 at least in this game. It is a good feeling to finish top of the group.

We knew this already. Chelsea does not expect to be in the champions league final until 2010. Sounds like our football has gone from good to great. Very good.

Liverpool and Real Madrid are through to the next round. Liverpool has been particularly impressive notching up three straight wins and scoring 16 goals in the process. Schalke progress as they put Rosenborg at the right pace in the table. Will be interesting to see if Arsenal finishes on top or not. If Sevilla beats Slavia Prague tomorrow, Arsenal will end up at No.2 and I guess they’d the draw Barcelona. How’d that be!

Meanwhile, lots of time (a day more than Arsenal has) to prepare for the super Sunday. Still we need to see who would be available for Arsenal than for Chelsea as we are almost sure about who might play for the Blues. Let’s see who recovers or who breaks their toe in the training.

A nice debatable post coming up your way sometime tomorrow or the day after! Till then, bye!