Chelsea Still Not Practising Penalties Apparently

I have to say after Ray Wilkins indignance about Arsenal’s "lack of respect" for the competition and his insistence that Chelsea wouldn’t field a weakened side, I was a little surprised to see the likes of Terry, Lampard, and Obi Mikel left out of the starting line-up.

Of course, they were on the bench just in case although Petr Cech, Jose Bosingwa, and Nicholas Anelka were all given the night off and with players like Ricardo Carvalho, Michael Ballack, Joe Cole, and Michael Essien missing anyway, Scolari might just be rueing his selection now.

Still, no excuses because the side we put out probably should have been good enough to get us into the next round.

I didn’t see the game in its entirety so I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of who was at fault and why, although from the highlights I did see we certainly had enough chances to put this one to bed.

A combination of poor finishing and the woodwork seemed to take it to extra time and penalties though—and we all know how good we are at those.

Unfortunately, by the time we’d got to the shoot-out, Drogba and Deco had already been subbed, and Di Santo and Belletti had both fallen foul of Chelsea’s new injury rules which require at least two players per game to go off, so the candidates kind of picked themselves about as confidently as Sarah Palin conducts an interview no doubt.

So anyway, penalties and Burnley up first: Alexander and Lampard score 1-1; Mahon scores, Bridge misses 1-2; Eagles and Kalou score 2-3; MacDonald and Ferreira score 3-4; Elliot misses and Malouda scores 4-4.

So onto sudden death: Duff scores 5-4 to Burnley. Mikel steps up and as is all to often the case in these shoot-outs, Chelsea go out on penalties.

After the game, Chelsea manager Luiz Felipe Scolari stated: “We feel if we made one goal more we would finish the game.

"It’s what I say every day to my players that when you arrive in front of goal you need to make a goal, you need to score, and we made a mistake, two three, four times.

"They had one chance to score and they scored—finish. That’s the problem. We lost against Liverpool, we lost against Roma and today we lost against Burnley. Every time we lost it’s a problem for us.

"We need to try again with the confidence for the players. We are in a good position in the Premier League, we are in a good position in the Champions League and now we are out of this cup.”

Well spotted Phil.

Teams

Chelsea: Cudicini, Ivanovic, Alex, Belletti (Lampard 25), Bridge, Ferreira, Deco (Mikel 46), Mineiro, Malouda, Drogba (Di Santo 68), Kalou.
Subs: Hilario, Sinclair, Terry, Woods.

Goals: Drogba 27

Burnley: Jensen, Alexander, Duff, Caldwell, Jordan, Eagles, Gudjonsson (MacDonald 97), McCann, Elliott, Blake (Mahon 76) , Paterson (Akinbiyi 60).
Subs: Penny, McDonald, Rodriguez, Kay

Goals: Akinbiyi 69

Ref: Keith Stroud (Hampshire)