When they extended their lead at the top of the Premier League with a hard-fought win over Swansea on the weekend, Chelsea left their fans delirious in the Transfer Tavern.
Our bar staff were dusting off bottles of Moet and keeping the pitchers flowing for Blues fans revelling in their club’s latest victory, with some going as far as to make outlandish bets with disgruntled rivals that the Londoners will be champions in May.
And their optimism is justified, with Antonio Conte’s team still the dominant force in English football even though their fantastic 13-game winning run came to an end over the winter. After that defeat to Spurs they dusted themselves down and have gone unbeaten, while also making it to the last eight of the FA Cup, keeping dreams of a double trophy haul firmly alive.
Of Conte’s regulars, it’s hard to pick any that have let the Italian down, but there have been a few villains in this story, and out landlord has chosen TWO…
Oscar
The headline-grabber of the January transfer window, not many Chelsea fans were too unhappy to see Oscar become one of the latest big-name players to slip off to China for the vast cash being thrown at footballers. This was quite a strange state of affairs given how many Blues fans used to sing his name aloud in the Tavern during the early years of his Stamford Bridge career, and we still see some watching that goal vs. Juventus through misty eyes when collecting the empties late on a Friday night.
Alas, much time had passed before he took his flight to Shanghai to sign for SIPG, and his performances when called upon over the opening months of the campaign were pretty shoddy. Zero goals and just the one assist in nine league outings for the form team in English football was far from inspiring, so there’s little wonder Roman Abramovich’s eyes lit up when he got a phone call from China!
Branislav Ivanovic
Like Oscar, Ivanovic was kicked unceremoniously out of the exit door in January, heading to Russia to represent Zenit Saint-Petersburg. The 33-year-old will go down as one of Chelsea’s finest players of the modern era – one mad regular in the Tavern even has a picture of him in his wallet – so it was sad to see him become a liability in the early months of the season at Stamford Bridge.
The Eastern European was too slow and cumbersome to be a right-back or right wing-back in Conte’s set-up, while he lacked the ball-playing ability to push ahead of Cesar Azpilicueta to be the third centre-back in the effective 3-4-3 set-up, and when called upon he made gaffes that pretty much ensured he was on his way out either in the winter or on a freebie when his contract ended in the summer.
