Source: Daily_Mail
Chelsea 2 Wigan 1: Lampard keeps Hiddink heading for second best
Even the Chelsea faithful seem to have woken up to the fact that their team's task in the Barclays Premier League this season is now to finish second.
The biggest cheer of the afternoon at Stamford Bridge came as Frank Lampard rescued the three points for his team against a Wigan
side who, on the balance of play, probably deserved a draw.
The second biggest accompanied John Terry's volley to hand his side the lead. But running them both a close third was the outpouring of emotion greeting the news that Liverpool had gone two behind at Middlesbrough.
Guus Hiddink is a superb manager and just what Chelsea's faltering season needed, but he is no miracle worker.
The vastly experienced Dutch coach was wise enough to state that Manchester United's lead is virtually insurmountable, even if Chelsea do narrow the gap at the top to four points with a win at Portsmouth on Tuesday night.
Hiddink even proved himself to be ever so slightly fallible with the introduction of loanee Ricardo Quaresma as Wigan started to get a foothold in the game.
The Portuguese winger was partly to blame for allowing Maynor Figueroa to deliver the cross which Olivier Kapo stabbed over the line ahead of his marker Nicolas Anelka while the man who was supposed to be doing the job, another Hiddink substitution in Juliano Belletti, was nowhere to be seen.
Whether the positive step of introducing Quaresma was in deference to the type of football that watching owner Roman Abramovich craves, only Hiddink knows.
But after just two weeks in the job he, like all his predecessors, has come to realise that when Chelsea are in a tight spot, it is the British bulldogs who invariably come to the rescue.
'It is important to have those terrific professionals out there,' said Hiddink, referring to Terry and Lampard.
'I had respected them from outside as long as I had known them. But now I know them from very close, my respect for them has grown.
'You have to have the basic qualities as a player - they both have that - but they also have the determination which is decisive in a player.'
By the time Terry sent a volley skimming off Emerson Boyce's bald pate and into the net on 25 minutes, Paul Scharner had already forced a fine one-handed stop from Petr Cech and man of the match Titus Bramble had seen a header cleared off the line by Ashley Cole.
Frank Lampard's injury-time winner came after a second half in which Chelsea once again appeared to have hit a wall at around the 70-minute mark.
Lampard became the latest player to agree with his new manager that Chelsea's fitness levels are not what they should be.
'At this stage of a season, fitness shouldn't be an area where we're lacking, and we're going to need to be fit if we're going to win anything this year,' he said.
'The manager was right when he made those comments last week about our overall fitness.
'He hasn't been here long, but he's a clever man and a cute man. He sees things very clearly, he's been there and done it with big teams all over the world and he's made an immediate impact.'
Wigan manager Steve Bruce was left to bemoan referee Lee Probert's failure to spot the merest of nudges by Lampard on Mario Melchiot as he rose to head the winner home, although the goal probably had more to do with the former Chelsea defender's poor positioning.