Sport: The Crow/The Wroe: Official: The top eight teams in Europe do not include Chelsea...and Tom Huddlestone is on the mend
Published: 18 March 2010
The Crow - by RICHARD OSLEY
SORRY Chelsea fans.
It’s official. Facts are facts. I’m not making anything up. Not twisting anything.
Arsenal are in Europe’s elite eight teams, quarter finalists in the most important competition on the continent. Chelsea are not.
And in the end, for all his bravado, Jose Mourinho, now at Inter Milan, had a point when he questioned what has happened at the Bridge since he left. Chelsea have hardly won a bean. Their fans mock Arsenal, remember, they’re one of Europe’s top eight teams now, for their lack of trophies in recent years.
But tot up the Chelsea prizes and you see all that they’ve really won recently is one FA Cup, a Tottenham-esque trinket of a return for a club that has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on transfers and players’ wages.
Ashley Cole, for example, feels like he’s been a Chelsea player for yonks but he’s never won a Premiership. Never won a Champions League.
And for all that money, they are still missing something else: class. Said it before, proven right again on Tuesday night as Didier Drogba was sent off and JT ranted and raved. Chelsea lack class. Now they lack a place in the business end of Champions League as well. Bye. Bye.
The Wroe - by PIP WROE
SO as Arsenal made a mountain out of the molehill against 10 men Hull, Spurs cruised past Blackburn with a now familiar ease.
Roman Pavlyuchenko bagged his eighth goal in six games (more prolific than Wayne Rooney, you may notice) to leave the fourth spot that Spurs have dominated all season winking and smiling at us and beckoning us to stay.
Of course, we have the pleasure of facing Man United, Chelsea and Arsenal in a row towards the end of the season so we have to try to creep ahead now to leave us in good stead. Then, God willing, Nicklas Bendtner will have scored his five for the season and Rooney will have to be rested after scoring his 43 goals for the campaign.
So to me, only a slight optimist, it seems we have it sown up.
All we have to do in the meantime is give those massively over-achieving Cottagers a spanking at the Lane next week and we’re off to Wembley for the third year in a row.
The FA Cup clash where we will most likely see a crushed group of west-London mercenaries wandering around the pitch muttering about how good Jose Mourinho is and how much they miss his training methods.