Stoke City v Chelsea | Jacob Steinberg

• Hit F5 for all of the latest updates from the match • Stats centre: league tables, top scorers and much more • And you can email jacob.steinberg.casual@guardian.co.uk 3 min: Pennant curls it into the six-yard box, but the whistle blows for a foul on Cech. 2 min: The first Rory Delap long throw of the season. The first of many. He hurls it in from the right and with some difficulty, Cech, flapping slightly, punches clear. Ramires hooks it out of the box, but Stoke keep the pressure up, Walters winning a corner on the left. 1 min: At a very loud Britannia Stadium – as if that needed saying – we’re off. Chelsea, kicking from right to left, get us going. Fernando Torres doesn’t mess up the kick-off, so he’s already looking better than he did last season. “Going by the success of debutants so far I reckon Villas-Boas’ll get manhandled by Shawcross and get red-carded,” offers Oliver Lewis. Or he’ll nick Tony Pulis’s baseball cap. These youngsters get up to all sorts. Ray Wilkins, in the commentary box, makes a very good point about Drogba’s absence from the starting line-up meaning Chelsea will be weaker when defending set-pieces. Good old Raymondo. The first email. “Did he?” asks Benjamin List of Adrian Mole. “He quoted from it in his impassioned argument about the Falklands, he must’ve had some knowledge, even if it was only an inkling, as to it’s intended meaning. Anyway, 1-1. Lampard with Chelsea’s, Woodgate for Stoke. But he’ll injure himself in the process and it’ll turn from triumph to tragedy.” Chelsea won’t have fond memories of Jonathan Woodgate as well. Everyone’s been asking about what to expect from Villas-Boas. I’ve got no idea to be honest, having not followed the Portuguese league last season. I do know that he’s 33 and worked for Jose Mourinho though. Stoke (4-4-2): Begovic; Huth, Shawcross, Woodgate, Wilson; Pennant, Delap, Whelan, Etherington; Jones, Walters. Subs: Sorensen, Collins, Pugh, Diao, Whitehead, Wilkinson, Shotton. Chelsea (4-3-3): Cech; Bosingwa, Alex, Terry, Cole; Ramires, Mikel, Lampard; Kalou, Torres, Malouda. Subs: Hilario, Ivanovic, Benayoun, Drogba, Ferreira, McEachran, Anelka. Referee: Mark Halsey (Lancashire) Some early team news for you. Fernando Torres starts for Chelsea. He suffered concussion during Spain’s defeat to Italy on Wednesday, but is deemed fit to play. Well. That’s a big vote of confidence in the Spaniard from Villas-Boas. Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka are apparently left on the bench. So can Andre Villas-Boas do it on a dry, warm Sunday afternoon in Stoke? There are probably better places than the Britannia Stadium for the manager – who is 33 years old and used to work for Jose Mourinho – to get acquainted with English football. In this fixture last season, Stoke gave Chelsea a good going over and were desperately unlucky not to come away with all three points, the match ending in a 1-1 draw. There shouldn’t be too many surprises from Stoke: no-nonsense defending, set-pieces, a reliance on Matthew Etherington to provide the creativity, plenty of long balls and no end of endeavour from their two attackers. It sounds simple, but then Adrian Mole thought Animal Farm was a pleasant novel about a group of animals on a farm. Although Chelsea have a new look in the dug-out, not much has changed on the pitch. In fact, three years after Sir Alex Ferguson suggested that Chelsea were too old to win the title, there squad largely remains the same from then, barring a few tweaks here and there. The days of big spending at Stamford Bridge increasingly appear to be over, the splurge on Fernando Torres and David Luiz in January the exception rather than the rule. From 2003 to 2006, Chelsea bought the likes of Hernan Crespo, Juan Sebastian Veron, Didier Drogba, Arjen Robben, Michael Essien, Petr Cech, Ricardo Carvalho, Michael Ballack and, er, Andriy Shevchenko. This summer, they’ve bought Oriol Romeu and Thibault Courtois, with Romelu Lukaku on the way. Not quite the same, is it? The problem for Villas-Boas’s predecessor, Carlo Ancelotti, during Chelsea’s dodgy spell last season was a thin squad and that problem hasn’t been rectified. Today Chelsea are likely to have a clutch of youngsters, squad players and Fernando Torres on the bench. Perhaps Luka Modric will be signed. Wesley Sneijder’s available as well. Hint, hint. Right now, Chelsea do not have a team capable of keeping up with the Manchester clubs, let alone one that can harbour realistic hopes of winning the Champions League, the holy grail for Roman Abramovich. No pressure, AVB. Premier League 2011-12 Stoke City Chelsea Premier League Jacob Steinberg guardian.co.uk

Posted by on August 14, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.