Special Needs

Some people would have us believe that Chelsea are a superhuman team led by a manager so remarkable he’s almost as good as he keeps telling us he is - but even at Christmas time, there is a limit to how much fiction you can take.

The truth is that Chelsea are wobbling. With the exception of Didier Drogba they are, as Steve Curry put it, a team with flair players who don’t play with flair. They have begun to leak goals on a regular basis. They are no longer impregnable at home, having scraped a draw against Arsenal and more recently conceded yet another draw to a battling Reading side with a farcical late equaliser worthy of the panto season.

Without Drogba’s brilliance and his special talent for spectacular late goals, they would by now be so far adrift of Manchester United the title would be almost beyond them – a position they themselves occupied a year ago.

It is not a situation which can entirely be explained by the absence of Petr Cech and John Terry, because a club with such enviable resources can afford to cover all contingencies.

Now, as the January transfer window approaches, it will be interesting to see what they do, because one way or another, you get the feeling that Chelsea are about to pay. Big time.