Last season, the football gods did not favor Chelsea Football Club when it came to cup draws. It would only make sense for the English Football League to throw the west London outfit a bone considering that. It did just the trick, giving Chelsea their opponent outside the top-two tiers of English football in the EFL Cup since Barnsley in September 2020.
Coming off its first win of the young Premier League season, Mauricio Pochettino’s team encounter League Two side AFC Wimbledon at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night. It will be the first meeting between these two clubs since February 2000 in the Premier League. In order to reach this stage in the competition, the south-west London outfit came back to take down Championship side Coventry City in the last four minutes of regulation plus stoppage time.
The League Two outfit brought in eight permanent transfers, and two loanees in the hopes of improving from a campaign that nearly ended with non-league football around the corner. Though, winning the English top-flight for the Blues is a pipe dream, capturing a cup in Pochettino’s first year is not out of the realm of possibility.