Who’d be in your Chelsea XI v Wolves?
We’ve now slipped to 5th place in the table and are only ahead of Arsenal (6th) and Liverpool (7th) by virtue of goal difference, so have to start turning things around quickly as we face falling even deeper.
I applaud Villas-Boas for wanting to get Chelsea to play more entertaining football, but I think we have too many players that are long in the tooth and many of them are past it, so revolutionising the club is an unenviable task at the moment and we may have to go back to basics until the January window comes around.
But who should play against Wolves tomorrow? Here’s the team I would pick…
P. Cech
B. Ivanovic – Alex – J. Terry (c) – A. Cole
Ramires – R. Meireles – F. Lampard
J. Mata
D. Sturridge – F. Torres
The defence is by far the hardest problem to solve at Chelsea as none of our defensive players appear to be playing well. I’ve called for his return for a while now and I still think that Alex deserves a run of games in an attempt to solidify our defensive line. He wasn’t particularly great when coming on against Leverkusen, but he’s only play in patches and can only be equally as bad as David Luiz and JT at the worst.
Our midfield also needs to work harder in order to help the lads at the back out. The whole point of playing a high line is to try win the ball as high up the pitch as possible, but neither the midfielders or the attackers putting enough pressure on the opposition when we haven’t got the ball. I’m expecting (hoping) that we’ll have most of the ball when we’re playing Wolves and am opting for Meireles as the deep midfield option as he gets his foot in as well as adding to the attack.
Juan Mata hasn’t been getting on the ball enough our last few games and hasn’t been able to influence the play as much as he should be doing. We could try playing him in a free role behind the forwards, which in theory should make him harder to pick up and hopefully we’ll be able to supply him quick enough.
Didier Drogba took his goal well in the week but still didn’t do enough over the course of the game. He also doesn’t have much of a future at the club, so we have to try get the best out of where we’ve invested our money. Fernando Torres needs to improve and I reckon it’s worth trying him in tandem with Daniel Sturridge, who is the only shoo-in in our attack at the moment.