Chelsea take on Real Madrid, the England women’s team play a World Cup warm-up match and Marcus Edwards may wish to serve another reminder of who he is.
Champions League game to watch – Chelsea vs Real Madrid
The history of Chelsea in the Champions League invites us to suspend our disbelief. At the end of a patchy 2011/12 season in which they finished sixth in the Premier League table, five points adrift of fourth-placed Spurs, they lifted the European Cup for the first time under the somewhat surprising managerial presence of Roberto Di Matteo.
Nine years later, in front of banks of empty seats brought about by the pandemic, they won the trophy again by upsetting Manchester City in the final, even though they’d only sneaked into fourth spot in the Premier League by a point from Leicester City.
Everything we know about their quarter-final against Real Madrid suggests that getting into the last four of the competition this time around has to be a stretch too far. This is, after all, Real Madrid: the team that swaggers through this competition with an arrogance that only comes when you’ve won it 10 times already. And furthermore, this isn’t just any old Real Madrid team. This is Real Madrid as coached by Carlo Ancelotti, a man who’s been a domestic champions in five different countries as a manager, as well as having won the Champions League four times himself.
No part of this match-up should hint in any way that Chelsea have a chance, but their escapades in 2012 and 2021 do leave the door to a surprise result tantalisingly open. It can hardly be said that they don’t need it. Even with a quarter of it still to play, their abysmal season in the Premier League already means that winning the Champions League represents Chelsea’s only realistic chance of qualifying for next year’s iteration of this competition, and if things don’t perk up a little in the league soon they could yet be missing out on European football next season altogether.
Their first game under Frank Lampard didn’t suggest that a substantial wind of change is blowing through Stamford Bridge. They managed one unthreatening shot on target all afternoon at Molineux against Wolves, continuing a theme that has been ongoing all season of struggling in front of goal. Only Kai Havertz and Raheem Sterling have scored more than three goals for them this season in all competitions, a dismal record all the more accentuated by the fact that they’ve spent so much money on new…
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