In a closely contested match at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea managed to narrowly edge past AFC Wimbledon, securing a 2-1 victory in the second round of the EFL Cup on Wednesday evening.
The encounter saw Chelsea, one of the Premier League giants, field a formidable starting lineup, while AFC Wimbledon, who compete in the English League One, demonstrated remarkable resilience throughout the match.
Chelsea’s manager, Thomas Tuchel, expressed his thoughts on the challenging game, saying, “We knew it wouldn’t be an easy match. AFC Wimbledon put up a strong fight, and credit to them for making it difficult for us.”
The scoring commenced in the 20th minute when Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez, a young talent who has been gaining attention for his recent performances, delivered a precise strike from just outside the penalty area. Enzo’s goal put Chelsea in the lead, delighting the home crowd.
Despite being a goal down, Wimbledon displayed commendable determination. Their efforts were rewarded in the 34th minute when Joe Pigott, a key figure for Wimbledon, netted a well-placed header from a corner, equalizing the score.
The second half saw both teams pushing for the elusive winning goal, with the tension mounting at Stamford Bridge. It was Chelsea’s Kai Havertz who ultimately delivered the decisive strike in the 74th minute, capitalizing on a defensive lapse by Wimbledon. Havertz’s goal secured Chelsea’s progression to the next round of the EFL Cup.
AFC Wimbledon’s manager, Mark Robinson, acknowledged his team’s spirited performance, stating, “I’m proud of my players tonight. They gave their all against a top-class opponent like Chelsea. We’ll take the positives from this and continue our journey in League One.”
Chelsea’s victory ensures their presence in the third round of the EFL Cup, where they will eagerly await their next opponent. The match showcased the unpredictable nature of cup competitions, with lower-league teams like AFC Wimbledon consistently proving their mettle against top-tier opposition.
As the EFL Cup unfolds, football enthusiasts can anticipate more thrilling encounters, where underdogs aim to create memorable upsets while established clubs like Chelsea seek to assert their dominance.
In an amazing development in the realm of football, sources have demonstrated that staff individuals at Chelsea Football Club are supposedly putting forth attempts to obstruct Mauricio Pochettino’s potential £50 million arrangement with Tottenham Hotspur.
This improvement comes following quite a while of hypothesis connecting the Argentine supervisor to a thrilling re-visitation of North London, where he recently filled in as the lead trainer for rival club Tottenham Hotspur.
Yet again as per insider reports, Pochettino has been in cutting edge talks with Tottenham’s board to expect the administrative job. In any case, Chelsea’s staff individuals are allegedly working secretively to frustrate this arrangement.
A source near the circumstance, who mentioned secrecy, uncovered, “There is serious areas of strength for an inside Chelsea’s inward circle that Pochettino’s arrangement at Tottenham would fundamentally reinforce their crew and make them certifiable title competitors. Accordingly, certain staff individuals are attempting to hinder the arrangement from going through.”
Mauricio Pochettino, known for his shrewd strategic methodology and history of creating youthful ability, has been profoundly pursued since his takeoff from Paris Holy person Germain recently. His residency at PSG was set apart by blended results, remembering a homegrown association title however frustration for the UEFA Champions Association.
Tottenham, then again, has been looking for a top notch supervisor since the flight of Nuno Espirito Santo recently. Pochettino’s past spell at the club somewhere in the range of 2014 and 2019 saw him lift Prods to a serious power in English football and arrive at the UEFA Champions Association last in 2019.
In spite of Pochettino’s supposed craving to get back to Tottenham, the supposed obstruction from Chelsea’s side might actually muddle the dealings. The two clubs, as well as the footballing scene, anticipate further improvements in what has turned into an unforeseen off-pitch competition.
Neither Chelsea nor Tottenham has authoritatively remarked on the circumstance, and the subtleties encompassing the indicated obstruction stay speculative. In any case, as the 2023-2024 football season draws near, the interest encompassing Pochettino’s future keeps on developing, making this a story to watch before very long.
In the realm of football, where loyalties and contentions run profound, the startling exciting bends in the road in administrative exchanges keep on catching the creative mind of fans and savants the same.
Emma Hayes said she was proud of her players following their Champions League semi-final exit after a 1-1 draw with Barcelona at Camp Nou was not enough to overturn the 1-0 defeat at Stamford Bridge.
“For us, we’re not going through because of the home tie,” said Hayes. “It’s very difficult to come here. If there was a little bit longer in the game, I think we would have gone on and won it. But I can’t ask for any more, I don’t know many teams that can come here and put them under pressure. They were panicking, you could hear it on the touchline. Even their manager got booked, they’re not used to that.”
The England defender Niamh Charles said: “We did not come here simply to soak up Barça pressure and then play on the break. We tried to balance knowing where and when to push and press but also when to sit and hold at the right time, because we respect them. Across this and the first leg, it’s about fine details. We’ll come again next year.”
Guro Reiten’s goal for Chelsea came four minutes after her compatriot Caroline Graham Hansen had extended Barcelona’s lead in the tie to two goals. It was a moment to stun the home crowd, which is not used to seeing Barcelona conceding given that the Catalan giants have let in just five goals in the league this season. At the Camp Nou this season in the WCL they had previously beaten Rosengard 6-0, Roma 5-1 and Bayern Munich 3-0: an average of 4.6 goals per game.
“Look at the previous results here,” said Hayes. “I don’t think you understand how challenging it is playing in this stadium with an unbeaten record in the last four years. You have to stay in football matches. I can’t criticise our performance tonight. We’re going out in the competition because of the home leg. Today, I think the better team lost.”
Hayes added that “the gap is closing across Europe and today’s performance was evidence of that.”
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Responding to the claim that the better team had lost, Barcelona manager Jonatan Giráldez said: “I think there [at Stamford Bridge] we were better. For me, the result there was tighter than it should have been and in the return leg we were superior as well in general. We dominated almost the entire game.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
There was a moment, shortly before half-time, when the Chelsea left wing-back Niamh Charles thought she had done it. ‘It’ being escaping from one-on-one duel with Barcelona’s Caroline Graham Hansen at the umpteenth time of asking with the ball in her possession.
Charles skated free of the forward, who scrambled to stay on her feet in front of the dugouts, with all the enthusiasm of a child that had just beaten their older sibling in a card game for the first time. Except it was a false alarm, the referee’s whistle halting Charles’ charge and pulling the ball back towards the spot where Graham Hansen was fouled by the England player.
As in the first leg of Chelsea’s Champions League semi-final showdown with Barcelona, Charles’s flank quickly became the focal point of Barcelona’s attack, leaving the Chelsea captain Magda Eriksson brutally exposed on the left-hand side of the back three. It was a familiar story. In the 2021 Champions League final, Barcelona left inexperienced full-backs Charles and Jess Carter in their wake as they scored four inside 36 minutes.
Two years later, in the first leg at Stamford Bridge, and Chelsea were a goal down inside four minutes. Graham Hansen was the architect, driving towards the edge of the box as Chelsea players stood off her, before unleashing a wicked left-footed strike into the far corner. In contrast to the final, a collapse was staved off, but the gulf in class between the two sides was more than evident.
At Camp Nou, which began to heave from about 15 minutes in as fans filtered in for the early kick-off at the end of the working day, Graham Hansen was rampant and unsparing as she ravaged Chelsea’s left flank. The Norwegian forward would put the ball in the back of the net early again, in the ninth minute this time, having ducked in front of Charles to collect the ball left for her by Eriksson before VAR ruled the effort out for her having controlled the ball with her arm in the process.
There was no halting the forward though, who before the half-hour mark would leave Charles on the ground before picking out Marta Torrejon to fire over the bar.
Charles struggled, but there can be little shame in struggling to contain one of the best wingers in the game, one who is criminally underrated. That Graham Hansen has never even made the short-list for the Ballon d’Or, frankly, makes a mockery of the award that bids to recognise the world’s best players. After she was omitted from the list in the year when Barcelona swaggered to that 4-0 Champions League final victory over Chelsea, the forward felt the need to respond on Twitter, such was the noise over her absence.
“To everyone who is wondering. It’s all good,” she said. “We won the treble and we are working our asses off to achieve this again. All that matters and the only thing that matters.”
Also absent that year, 2022, was Aitana Bonmatí, who is the metronome of the Barcelona attack and whose link-up play with Graham Hansen against Chelsea was a highlight. It was fitting, then, that the goal that would put Barcelona two goals up in the tie, albeit with Chelsea getting one back through fellow Norwegian forward Guro Reiten, would come from the deadly Bonmatí-Graham Hansen axis.
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Aitana Bonmati celebrates after Barcelona reached the Champions League final. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Released by Mariona Caldentay, Bonmatí’s deft first touch set her sweeping length of the Chelsea half, she played the ball through to Graham Hansen and the forward’s strike could only be cleared into the inside side netting by an overstretched Carter, with the goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger beaten.
The Spaniard Alexia Putellas may be the crown jewel of a Barcelona side with a wealth of talent that has coped unerringly well with the loss of her sparkle following her ACL injury on the eve of the Euros last year, but it is the Norwegian Graham Hansen that is the driving force of Barcelona’s unstoppable wide play.
There are rumours that the golden girl of Norwegian women’s football and the first woman to win the Ballon d’Or, Ada Hegerberg, could be tempted away from eight-time European champions, Lyon, by the Catalan club. She would be a Galactico-style signing. In Graham Hansen though, who extended her contract with the club in January until June 2026, Barcelona have a quality Norwegian forward deserving of a similar spotlight.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
So, that plan. Everyone wants to see the plan, to see the world in a grain of sand, to see the nuts and bolts of a sophisticated modern footballing philosophy in a promising 15-minute spell either side of the break. The truth is, there is no plan yet. Just the kind of mid-tempo chaos you get when you are still at the thick end of one of the most audacious experiments ever seen in elite football. The bottom line is that Chelsea still can’t keep the ball and they still can’t keep it out. Everything else is bubbling test tubes and incomplete data.
There were 21 shots in the 1-0 defeat at Dortmund, which is at least something. João Félix probably should have had a couple of goals, Gregor Kobel made several fine saves for the hosts and, naturally for a Graham Potter team, the xG was off the charts. You might even argue that this was the sort of game Chelsea deserved to win. All the same, they keep failing to win them, largely because they keep doing the sort of things that teams do when they have no map, no structure to fall back on, no collective consciousness to drag them through the tough bits.
It was telling that with 20 minutes remaining, Potter reached for Marc Cucurella and Mason Mount: his tried and trusted toys. Mount made one fine tackle high up the pitch to create an opening; Cucurella, by contrast, wandered around like a man who had just stumbled out of a house fire. Booed when he came on and hounded every time he got the ball, there was a kind of pathos to him here: a £50m footballer who no longer really knows what any of this means, who no longer knows what the plan is here.
But of course these things work both ways. Opponents can’t really work you out if you don’t know what you’re doing yourself. If you’re a rival coach who wants to know how this Chelsea side combine with each other, how they react in certain situations, what do you do? What footage do you consult? And perhaps Chelsea’s best moments here were when the patterns broke down and they were forced to trust to pure individual quality at each end.
Thiago Silva heading away cross after cross. Mykhaylo Mudryk running at Marius Wolf on the left wing, losing it and inevitably getting it back again. Félix fluttering this way and that in the final third. Hakim Ziyech looking sharp in the second half. If you’re a coach with a vision and a blueprint, you take tactics over talent every time. But there are times when talent really doesn’t hurt.
The flip-side was the ease with which Dortmund could pass through Chelsea’s press, which at this stage of its gestation remains a largely theoretical thing. There are players in positions, certainly. Some of them running in a gutsy sort of way towards the ball. But virtually no concept of spacing or coordination just yet, no sense of a team moving as one, a system run by Zoom call. Can you communicate at all when the noise is this deafening and nobody really knows each other’s movements yet?
Graham Potter watches on as his Chelsea side lose the first leg of their last-16 Champions League tie with Borussia Dortmund 1-0 in Germany. Photograph: Paul Currie/Shutterstock
Perhaps the best example of this was at set pieces. Has a losing team ever taken as long over set pieces as this? Every free-kick seemed to involve a board-level summit, four or five players congregating on the ball while Silva waved his arms behind them. Goal-kicks were a similar story: as the centre-halves dutifully spread wide, Kepa looked up and realised that in the time he needed to set himself, every single teammate was marked. What’s the plan here, then?
And after that promising 15-minute spell, things fell apart in the most Chelsea way possible. Chelsea were offside at a corner, some players stopped, some players didn’t, and all of a sudden Karim Adeyemi was burning Enzo Fernández for pace, scoring the only goal of the game. If there was an irony here it was that the immaculately honed and structured Dortmund had struck Chelsea in just the way Chelsea were most likely to strike themselves: with a searing direct counterattack, a flash of individual brilliance, a finish that seemed almost prosaic in its assurance.
These are the sorts of things that happen when you are all cast and no movie. And as Dortmund cycled through their substitutes, there was perhaps another lesson for Chelsea here too. Dortmund have in many ways perfected a very similar model Chelsea are trying to follow: harvest Europe’s top young talent, develop it, nurture it, watch it swell in value. Adeyemi, a £30m summer signing from Salzburg, has been trusted through a torrid period by coach Edin Terzic, slowly learning his own game and Dortmund’s. Does Potter have the time to give a struggling young player that kind of leeway? Or does he simply shuffle in the next promising young card off the deck? What exactly is the plan here?
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Potter, for his part, seems like a coach second-guessing himself, torn between long-term renewal and short-term impact. The fans are already beginning to turn; desperate to see an A-list coach with this A-list squad. Chelsea still have a foot in this tie, which represents perhaps their last remaining thread to Champions League football next season. If it breaks, Potter may well end up being cut loose with it.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
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