First Blood to Chelsea

By: Rob | August 9th, 2009

Meaningless it might be, but it still caused a bit of controversy today as Chelsea won the Community Shield against Manchester United on penalties. It was an entertaining match, and finished 2-2 after the 90 minutes.

Chelsea’s win on penalties end a bad run for them in that respect – they’d lost the 5 penalty shoot outs (including 2 against United, one of which was that penalty shoot out in Moscow) previous to today, and while it isn’t going to be revenge for that Champions League final, it was probably quite sweet for the Chelsea players anyway.

Man United opened the scoring, Nani not closed down, and his shot sailed past an awkward looking Petr Cech, who looks further and further away from his early-Chelsea pomp with each passing season. At the other end, Ben Foster started in goal for Man United, and he made a couple of good saves, but his kicking was consistently shaky.

Chelsea came back into the match after half time, after a header from Rickie Carvalho highlighted exactly why he shouldn’t be shipped off to Inter Milan just yet.

Chelsea’s second was slightly contentious, and Alex Ferguson typically claimed it cost United the match. Evra passed to Rooney and as he tried to overlap got a forearm in the fact from Michael Ballack. As United had the ball, the ref played advantage, only United lost it and Lampard went up the other end and stuck it in.

While Chelsea’s players aren’t at fault for not kicking the ball out – they are told not to these days – the ref arguably could have stopped the game as Evra was on the ground (He has stopped the game in similar circumstances earlier on) but had Carrick or Rooney blazed it into the top corner, they would have complained the ref didn’t play on. Swings and Roundabouts.

At any rate it didn’t matter, as an exquisite pass from Ryan Giggs to an arguably offside Wayne Rooney put the England striker in, and he duly tucked it away to put the game to penalties.

In the shoot out, Giggs and Evra missed, meaning Soloman Kalou’s fourth penalty gave Chelsea the first bit of silverware for the season, and football is well and truly back.