Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. As if this week isn’t expensive enough.
There used to be a time when Boxing Day was one of the highlights of the season. You’d go down the match wearing your new scarf, gloves and jumper, your dad would make his once a year visit, moan about the price of the ticket that he never paid you for anyway, spend all the first half telling everyone in earshot that there’s none of them fit to lace the boots of Peter McParland/Danny Blanchflower/Gerry Hitchens and at half-time the stewards would look the other way while he passed his hipflask round. In the second half he’d say he was never coming down here again and go home to tell your mum how much he’d enjoyed it and he might start going again. And if Boxing Day was a Friday they’d play again the next day.
None of that’s going to happen again. This season we haven’t even got a Boxing Day match, because, well, nobody knows why not. Something to do with TV probably. What we have got is a Saturday match on TV at half past five. If that’s not bad enough we’ll be playing at Chelsea, which is never a pleasant place to go at the best of times, and over Christmas is a lot closer to the worst. Chelsea have got over that amusingly dodgy period when they went back to being an average mid-table team which is where they spent most of their history, and they’re doing well now. Not as well as us, but then again nobody is.
They’re owned by someone not as dodgy as their previous owner or the one before that and they’ve got the same manager they had when we played them last season, which doesn’t happen very often at Chelsea. He’s the one who started off at Smethwick and from there there’s only one direction you can go. When it comes to laughably pretentious titles in world football you’ve have to go some to beat Chelsea’s Head of Global Goalkeeping. They’ve got Axel Disasi still on their books and Omari Kellyman is on loan at Cardiff, no doubt dreaming of having a career as notable as Carney Chukwuemeka. We’ve done well out of Chelsea lately when it comes to transfers.
Our team will be the usual selection of world-beaters record-breakers and legends. Another day, another three points.
