Chelsea FC—Premier League Season Review

Chelsea Football Club has finished the Premier League season with 85 points and in second place. I think this is just about what we deserved given United's pure dominance throughout the season.

You could argue that it was a poetic-justice that we conceded the late goal to Bolton to take us off level with the champions, Manchester United. The fact is simple: we weren’t the best team over 38 games. We had our ups and downs and our inconsistency was our undoing.

When we were at our best, we were the best. Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool would struggle to match us. This was confirmed by the defeats of all these sides in the end of the season. Had we been able to mimic these performances in even the majority of our games we might be flying the blue flag and calling ourselves champions, but that is not the case.

This season we have been surprisingly inconsistent at the back and we have been leaking goals all over the place. To add insult to injury, we have been struggling in front of goal too.

To be honest, the lack of goals wouldn't be a problem if we had the strength to hold on to slender leads. If the team is set out to score ONE goal and defend that 1-0 lead, then they damn well better do it.

There have been far too many instances, where we've thrown away games from winning positions. E.g. Tottenham (twice), Aston Villa, Wigan, Portsmouth, Everton, Bolton. We've failed to score against Aston Villa, Manchester United, Arsenal, Fulham, Blackburn, Liverpool in the league. Too add to that just to prove a point, Barnsley, Schalke, Valencia, and Olympiakos in the FA Cup and Champions league respectively.

Even more damaging was our ever growing injury/international duties list that only solved itself in late January/early February.

If you took out the likes of the players we missed for some amount of time (Carvalho, Terry, Lampard, Ballack, Essien, Mikel, Drogba, Kalou, Shevchenko, Malouda, Cech, Cudicini) in the other big clubs, they would have drowned very early. Arsenal’s injury list at its peak was minuscule compared to ours and they collapsed after some were sidelined.

We have our huge squad to thank for keeping us in the race through these troubled times.

I can't help but feel, if we just had clinged on to those 1-0 leads, the title might have been ours. That's not taking anything away from United, who played a great season themselves and deservedly won the league.

If we want to win back the title we need to become offensively smooth. If we continue to be satisfied with 1-0's, 2-0's, 2-1's, good defensive display, some odd attacking performances with 6-0 wins then we are not going anywhere.

We have to admit that Sir Alex Ferguson has raised the bar and this young United side is only going to get better and they are already looking to spend more cash which will further improve their ranks

We should take a leaf from SAF that when we were enjoying our back-to-back titles he came back with sheer determination and broke our stronghold. We need to do the same to them now.

In the FA CUP,  we've been rather lucky in the sense that we drew lower league teams in each round apart from 4th round. We started out beating QPR in a lacklustre 1-0 win in the 3rd round. In the 4th round we played our only premiership opposition , Wigan. It was here Anelka scored his first goal in a Chelsea shirt. We ran out 2-1 winners. In the 5th round we drew Huddersfield and we comfortably disposed of them 3-1 and made our way to the quater finals. This was the round Liverpool and Arsenal were eliminated and we had our sights firmly on the final now, hoping we wouldn't meet United before it.

Again, we were lucky enough to draw another lower league team. This time it was Barnsley, who had conquered Liverpool in the previous round. Having seen United get knocked out by Portsmouth earlier in the day, The FA CUP was surely there for the taking. But No, we suffered the same humiliation Liverpool did in the round before and Barnsley disposed of us 1-0. To add to our woes, Barnsley were eliminated in the following round by championship team, Cardiff.

I sound all negative but it werent. From the position we left ourselves in by sacking Jose, its a damn proud achievement what the boys have done. 

Here's to a great Champions League final and fruitful summer...