Source: Telegraph
Aston Villa 2 Chelsea 1: match report
When James Collins ghosted in front of Petr Cech for a winning header of glorious simplicity, John Terry’s reaction was telling. Up and down the Chelsea captain leapt, like a child who had just been refused his favourite lollipop.
In the manner of an over-indulged toddler, Terry was taught harshly by Aston Villa that he could no longer have things his own way.
Around him the columns of Chelsea’s imposing defence were crumbling. Cech was exposed, Ricardo Carvalho was fragile and even Frank Lampard betrayed glimpses of flakiness as his first-half flick-on gifted Villa their breakthrough. Carlo Ancelotti has taken great pride in his midfield diamond but this result proved that for all the dazzling brilliance of his creation, it was as good as worthless without the proper protection.
De Beers do not leave their gems out in the open on Bond Street, and Ancelotti should be more scrupulous about affording his finest assets some security. As it transpired, Villa executed their version of a heist with ease, their sharp set-pieces shattering Chelsea’s resistance like a sledgehammer against a jewellery shop window.
You would have thought, for a manager of Ancelotti’s painstaking thoroughness, that he could produce a team capable of keeping out corner kicks. But Villa found that this was an approach guaranteed to wreak havoc: Ashley Young needed only to angle a ball towards the head of an onrushing centre-half as first Richard Dunne, and then Collins, gratefully did the rest.
The nature of Chelsea’s undoing was as alarming as it was significant. At Wigan three weeks earlier they had proved just as susceptible from dead-ball positions, and here they succumbed to a second successive away defeat having tried, and failed, to heed the lesson.
“We lost for this situation,” Ancelotti admitted. “We made mistakes on the same plays against Wigan and we need to work to improve, because this is important. We have to pay more concentration in the box, to find more markers, to create more pressure.”
If only it were so straightforward. The Chelsea deficiencies lie in other areas besides the back four, with Cech nothing like as indomitable as in his pomp and Lampard, having scored only twice this season, inviting suspicions that he is not being played in a sufficiently attacking role.
But Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka seemed at a loss up front yesterday, their muscular influence snuffed out by the last-ditch tackling of Dunne and the defiance of Stiliyan Petrov. Indeed, the one occasion that Anelka commanded attention was when a desperate slide on the touchline succeeded in taking out Martin O’Neill, the Villa manager bundled inelegantly back towards his dugout. O’Neill looked sore but nothing much was injured, he reported, save for his pride.
“I thought we played brilliantly, considering how strongly we had to defend in the second half as Chelsea came through us,” O’Neill said. How close he came to expressing a grievance, after his side were denied a clear penalty for Jose Bosingwa’s pull on Gabriel Agbonlahor.
Villa rectified the injustice in the right fashion, the goals for Dunne and Collins a mark of their intent to stay on the offensive. Brad Friedel, too, was all but immovable, his spectacular save just before half-time thwarting Deco.
Dunne’s strike was just reward for sterling defensive duty, and it arrived courtesy of a rare lapse from Lampard, whose faint flick nudged the ball straight into his path for a powerful header past Cech.
Drogba’s opening salvo, a lobbed 25-yard finish after an inspired turn, was quickly erased, as were the catcalls against referee Kevin Friend for disallowing the penalty. Friend was a late replacement for Steve Bennett, who had to withdraw five minutes before kick-off through illness.
The decisive intervention by Collins, running on to another perfect Young corner and seizing on Cech’s failure to claim the ball, completed a famous Villa victory.
