Bradford City Loss A Blessing In Disguise For Chelsea FC

The loss to Bradford City was bitingly painful. It was not only a shocking defeat to the blues, but also a humiliation before the home fans. In fact, it is one of the most painful defeats of the last decade for Chelsea Football Club. For over a decade now, Chelsea has been so good in front of its home fans that rarely have such humiliating defeats been witnessed at Stamford Bridge, especially to lower tier opponents. And with Jose Mourinho in the dugouts, Chelsea fans always walk into Stamford Bridge with pride, knowing that nothing short of victory awaits them.

More from The Pride of London

The disgraceful defeat is now behind us. And the tears that showered our faces after the shameful defeat have since dried. In fact, after knocking out Liverpool in the Capital One Cup and reaching the finals of the campaign, pulling out a hard-earned draw against a rampant Manchester City, winning at Villa Park and exorcising the spell of bad luck that always accompanied Jose Mourinho to that stadium, and defeating Everton in a thrilling encounter, we can now reflect upon the defeat to Bradford City with more courage and more honesty. We can now look at the positive side of the loss to Bradford.

The dishonorable loss to Bradford City came just a few days after we had been thrashed 5-3 by Tottenham. And even though we had found our way back to form before the Bradford City game by beating Newcastle and Swansea, the Tottenham game had exposed some weaknesses in our team.

For instance, the humiliation at Tottenham proved that our defence had serious ailing that had to be cured before we faced top-tier opponents. However, the weaknesses were not so apparent because blame for that loss to Tottenham could be apportioned to almost all defenders who played that game.

By the time we faced Bradford City; the manager had rested Cahill and played Terry alongside Zouma. Courtois had also been rested in the Newcastle match. And when we crashed at home, the manager finally learned that Cahill is incapable of handling fast-paced attackers with top-class dribbling skills, such as Coutinho, Sterling, Navas, or even strong and speedy strikers such as Aguero, Lukaku and Ibrahimovic, among others.

Most significantly, the loss to Bradford City exposed Chelsea’s inability to rotate the current crop of players effectively and still get positive results. In fact, after the loss to Bradford, Mourinho came out openly and declared that he had not been rotating players because of the inability of the fringe members of the squad to come into the field and give top-class performances. But when he said this, many pundits blamed him for the poor performance of Salah, Remy and the rest because he had not given them enough play-time to improve their confidence.

Well, this debate for or against Jose Mourhino’s player rotation can go on and on, but one thing is more certain now: the elimination from the FA cup has allowed the first team players enough time to rest, rejuvenate and prepare for the three campaigns that Chelsea is still involved in this season.

Indeed, recently, this reality dawned on the PSG coach, Laurent Blanc, who had to label Jose a “genius” for the advantage the Chelsea team has before the cracking Champions League encounter. Complaining about fixture congestion, the Tottenham coach Mauricio Pouchettino has also recently claimed that Chelsea has an advantage before the Capital One Cup final.