Chelsea v Liverpool: Big Match Report

(Courtesy of pm107uk - flickr)

This was another exciting encounter at Stamford bridge as Chelsea sought to break their worst Premier League run against any club; 4 straight losses, and Liverpool looked to continue their decent league form.

Chelsea started as if they were going to win the game 4 or 5, and with the amount of chances they missed it could have been so. The first ‘he should have scored’ went to Oscar after he dispossessed Joe Allen, who had a poor game, in the Liverpool half after 6 minutes, played a neat one two with Eden Hazard and then dinked his left-footed shot over the bar. Chelsea continued to have the lion share of the attacking possession and this dominance paid off after twenty minutes when John Terry lost Daniel Agger and sent a powerful header into the top right-hand corner of the net from a Juan Mata corner. Brendan Rodgers will be unhappy with this poor marking as Terry’s run was not a particularly clever one but Agger got stuck behind Glen Johnson and Branislav Ivanovic and was nowhere to be seen by the time Terry met the ball. As well as losing the ball in important places Allen proved to be of no defensive help either; allowing Eden Hazard to ghost past him with a poor attempt at a foul brushed off easily by the Belgian, this led to a Fernando Torres chance which the Spaniard himself would have wanted to do much better with, the result a rather tame shot straight at Brad Jones. Shortly after this John Terry misplaced a pass straight to Luis Suarez who then ran at the former England captain but was fouled Ramires. The Brazilian shunted Suarez straight onto Terry’s knee, which bent in a way that a knee should never bend, and Terry’s scream could be heard as he went down in obvious agony. Chelsea are still waiting for Terry to have a scan on his knee but personally it didn’t look like the kind of injury you return from after a couple of weeks. (Quick addition a couple of hours later: looks like he'll be back in a couple of weeks, hilariously off the mark prediction). The worst miss of the match came after Cesar Azpilicueta took a long throw-in from his own half which rather comically saw Joe Allen, Daniel Agger and Jamie Carragher all go for the same header and none of them made it convincingly, which led to Mata receiving the ball from Oscar with only one defender between him and the goal. If Chelsea were guilty of spurning chances as a team then Mata must be considered culprit number 1, the Spaniard nutmegged Wisdom and smashed the ball over the bar to the general amazement of everybody watching.

The second half came with very little change; Liverpool were still giving the ball away all over the place and Chelsea were failing to capitalise. 10 minutes after half time Oscar picked up the ball on the left wing and tried to take it past Glen Johnson who put his arm across Oscar and cynically blocked him off with a forearm to the neck. Oscar then went down clutching his face and rolling around in a very embarrassing attempt to get Glen Johnson sent off, thankfully this kind of thing tends to stop after a year in the Premier League. Johnson, rightly, got a yellow. From the resulting free kick Torres had another good chance, this time with his head, but could only glance the ball straight to Brad Jones. Torres then went down in the box during the resulting clearance form a half-tackle from Steven Gerrard for which we very rarely see a penalty given. With 17 minutes of normal time to go Liverpool scored from a corner of their own. Jamie Carragher, with a flick of his head, managed to turn a relatively poor corner from Susso into an impossible-to-miss chance for Luis Suarez at the back post. It could be argued that Suarez gave Ramires a little push, but the Brazilian really should have been stronger and tighter to his man and, as Jamie Carragher put it after the game, “that’s part and parcel of defending a corner.” Love him or hate him (and who but a Liverpool fan could love him?) Suarez is dragging Liverpool along by the scruff of the neck and is absolutely indispensable to the Reds at the moment. This turned a fairly one-sided affair into an end-to-end match with both teams feeling that they had a good opportunity to take all 3 points. Ivanovic saw his header from another corner go sailing over the bar, an opportunity of the like we have seen him finish many times before. Then Luis Suarez could have doubled his tally when he timed his run perfectly and latched onto a fantastic through ball from Jose Enrique only to see Cech haring out of his goal to thwart the chance, nonetheless Suarez could, and perhaps should, have done better. With just seconds left Enrique himself had a chance but, instead of going across the keeper like you are taught to do, he drilled his shot to Cech’s near post who saved easily.

So 1-1 it stayed. Di Matteo was visibly disappointed with his side for not “killing the game off” and also, to his credit, didn’t complain too much when asked about Suarez’s nudge on Ramires for the Liverpool goal. Rodgers was also rightly critical of his side’s performance, particularly in the first half when they were “slow” but the Scot will undoubtedly be happy with a hard-earned point which, had Chelsea taken their chances, would have been an impossibility.

This is by far a better result for Liverpool, whose six game unbeaten run should see them climb the table soon enough, but with 4 draws in the run they will be hoping to get more ticks in the ‘W’ column, starting next week at home to Wigan. Chelsea are now 3 points off the top where they were 4 points ahead just 3 weeks ago and will need to get back to winning ways next weekend away at West Brom, which is far from an easy fixture.