They should be able to replace these two shouldn't they?
Thrilled
Sunderland boss Steve Bruce was justifiably thrilled with his players and hoped that the media would concentrate on how good his team were rather than on how bad Chelsea were.
“All round, they all produced a fantastic performance. I hope people talk about Sunderland rather than Chelsea’s poor performance. It’s not a fluke.”
In my ’Who’s Hot and Who’s Not’ article yesterday I praised Sunderland as the ‘Hot team’ and recognised the great performances of Michael Turner, Lee Cattermole and Asamoah Gyan. I could just have easily picked out any of their other eight players for a special mention. They were all exceptional.
Remiss
Unfortunately for Steve Bruce, it would be terribly remiss of us if we didn’t also take a closer look at how bad Chelsea were. Their manager, Carlo Ancelotti, was clear in his own mind about the level of performance.
“We have to meet about this on Thursday after the international break to look at what happened. I think this was the worst performance since I’ve been here. The performance was poor, but in football it can happen if you’re not at your best and don’t play with your best mentality. All the things were wrong. We didn’t play how we wanted to, Sunderland showed fantastic spirit and played better. We were not able to come back into the game. It was a bad day. We were not able to play our football for 90 minutes, only 15 minutes in the first half. One month ago everything was OK. Now we are in difficulty but we have to move on quickly.”
Chelsea are still at the top of the league but their lead has been cut to just two points when at one time they had looked as though they might run away with the title. They lost at Liverpool last week and scraped to an unconvincing 1-0 win over Fulham in midweek. Sunday’s defeat brought about the very rare occurrence of Chelsea suffering two defeats in a week.
Strongest
One of the reasons that Chelsea have been such red hot favourites to win the title has been the commonly held belief that they have the strongest and biggest squad of the top teams. It was felt that they were the club most able to cope with the inevitable injuries and suspensions that come the way of all teams.
Sunday’s defeat brings that belief sharply in to question. They were without John Terry, Alex, Frank Lampard and Michael Essien, but with such a strong squad, they should surely be able to cope with that. The players covering were the likes of Ferreira, Ramires, Bosingwa and Zhirkov. That’s one hundred and forty-two international caps and £68 million of expenditure right there. I would hazard a guess that those four ‘replacements’ are close to having more caps and cost more money than the entire Sunderland team put together.
The fact was that Chelsea were out-classed and out-fought by a team that hadn’t won away from home all season and had only won one away game in their last twenty-four. Yes, Sunderland were good, but a team of Chelsea’s supposed class should never have been brushed aside so easily by them.
Mystery
The dismissal of Ray Wilkins last week is clouded in mystery and it is possible that there are some problems behind the scenes that are as yet not public knowledge. It is, of course, also entirely possible that this past week has been a minor blip for Chelsea as they march on to domestic and European triumph through the rest of the season.
It is too early to judge which of the above proves to be correct in the long run, but it is absolutely true to say that Ancelotti is right when he says that was the worst Chelsea performance for a very long time.
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