Match Report: Swansea 1 – Chelsea 1

The “Football Association” decided that Swansea City away on a Tuesday night would be a good fixture with once again no thoughts to the travelling support that has to take time off work and head down the M4 to South Wales.

As such our regular match reporter, Gill Reeves, couldn’t leave her school as teacher for autistic children to attend this game and, yours truly was tasked with the job (don’t worry though, sanity will return for Sunday’s clash with Man Utd!)

The journey down to The Liberty Stadium was fairly uneventful, motorway, road works, big bridge that charges to get into Wales (I would have thought most would pay to actually get out!) more road works,  more motorway and in two and a half hours we were parked up with three hours to kick off!

Swansea seem to have spent a few bob in the area of the new ground, nice tight stadium with thankfully loads of seat legroom (a nice surprise these days when you are 6’ 6” and all leg!), Gill would have be impressed, like we were, with the facilities inside the ground for the disabled and, Swansea City FC should be rightly proud of the design of this compact arena.

20K supporters last night were in the stands, if Roman was to build something like this but twice the height then I reckon most Chelsea supporters wouldn’t complain too much.

Swansea started the game very brightly and we seemed to struggle with any sort of rhythm, Brendan Rogers had us sussed out from the start and time on the ball was minimal, the only real question was could the defence survive in the absence of John Terry and keep a forth consecutive clean sheet and hope the oppsosition would tire as the game went on.

With Lampard and Mikel also injured and Drogba and Kalou in the ACN, the squad was ‘thinner’ than we were used to but, none the less, should have had enough in reserve to put this game to bed.

The first half efforts resembled a Sunday pub team! and, not for the first time this season, seemed to struggle to get any momentum going, even after ‘old boy!’ Scott Sinclair scored to put the home side one up, we just didn’t look up for it, fair play to him for his ‘non celebration’

The second half saw a bit of an upsurge in performance but still couldn’t break down the Swansea defence, Ashley Cole got a second yellow late on and walked straight down the tunnel and silly little niggly fouls just disturbed any sort of cohesion.

The forth official put up 4 mins of injury time and the Chelsea support started to leave for an early trip home only to miss out on a diverted Jose Bosingwa shot with a minute to go to earn us a point, at least we had a consolation point to head home with.

Not good again, AVG doesn’t seem to see the wood from the trees and continues to play this type of frustrating to watch football, if this is what to expect for the rest of the season then fourth place is not looking likely, let alone third, the thought of Spu*s finishing ahead of us is not one I care to consider!

And finally a word about our new signing Cahill, why oh why was he left on the bench? JT is out and AVB still leaves our new boy out in the cold (and it was pretty cold last night!), it’s as if the boss is telling the players exactly who is in charge, bit like at Norwich when he did the ‘lets try and destroy Torres by taking him off when 99% of supporters were willing Sturridge off!’ Jose he isn’t, and his man management seems to be lacking, but what do we know? We just pay our money (£56.50 for Napoli today!! Geezus!) and travel across Europe to support these players.

“Win or Lose – Up the Blues”

Peter Trenter – CSG Co Vice-Chair

Stats from the BBC website:

Swansea City

• 01 Vorm
• 02 Williams
• 03 Taylor – Booked
• 04 Caulker
• 22 Rangel – Booked
• 07 Britton
• 11 Sinclair (Moore – 77′ )
• 12 Dyer
• 24 Allen
• 42 Sigurdsson (Agustien – 67′ )
• 10 Graham

Substitutes

• 25 Tremmel
• 16 Monk
• 15 Routledge
• 26 Agustien
• 29 Richards
• 18 Lita
• 19 Moore

Chelsea

• 01 Cech
• 02 Ivanovic
• 03 Cole – Dismissed after an earlier booking
• 04 David Luiz
• 17 Bosingwa
• 06 Romeu (Essien – 65′ )
• 15 Malouda – Booked (Lukaku – 80′ )
• 16 Meireles – Booked
• 09 Torres
• 10 Mata
• 23 Sturridge

Substitutes

• 22 Turnbull
• 19 Ferreira
• 24 Cahill
• 34 Bertrand
• 05 Essien
• 35 Piazon
• 18 Lukaku

Ref: Marriner

Att: 20,526

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