Chelsea 1 Bolton Wanderers 2A ghost of Christmas past turned up to haunt Chelsea on Saturday. Not that it was an ancient wraith, barely a year old in fact.
Nevertheless Bolton Wanderers' first win at Stamford Bridge for 28 years - back in the old Second Division - has awakened some eerily familiar echoes.
Last season Chelsea opened the festivities two points behind Arsenal in second place but by the evening of New Year's Day were eight off the lead, having taken one point from three games.
In rotating his team to keep players fresh, Claudio Ranieri all but spun them off the Premiership board. This time the Chelsea manager is approaching the holiday rush with a stronger set of options but his squad would still do well to heed the warning signs.
Roman Abramovich might have failed to persuade Arsenal to part with Thierry Henry for £50 million when the transfer window opens next month but Chelsea's Russian owner seems to have caught Highbury's virulent strain of squander bug and passed it on to Ranieri's attack.
The way Chelsea failed to measure their almost total domination of the opening half-hour of Saturday's match by more than the goal Hernan Crespo nodded in after 22 minutes was a copy of Arsenal's habitual profligacy.
Bolton then exploited two defensive lapses to win a fixture they would have been ecstatic to draw. After all, they had not previously taken a point from the Bridge in the Premier League and their last victory there in the old First Division had been in the 1959-60 season.
That said, Bolton's win surely registered only a medium shock on the game's seismic scale. Sam Allardyce's team did win at Old Trafford last season and have retained the ability to punish more vaunted opponents who drop their guard.
As the Bolton manager said afterwards: "Chelsea are a very good team but we are as good as most of the other teams and we deserve credit for winning and for the performance." In other words, Bolton did not win simply because their opponents faded away after half-time.
Ranieri was of the view that "in the second half we tired and lost the plot". Yet it was as much a case of Bolton seizing the script and giving themselves a few more lines after spending much of the first 45 minutes looking on mutely from the wings.
While Ricardo Gardner, Bolton's Jamaican left back, managed to keep pace with Jesper Gronkjaer and Glen Johnson on one flank, Nicky Hunt chased vapour trails as Damien Duff tore past him on the other. Only a touch was needed as low centres flew across Bolton's goalmouth but for once neither Crespo nor Adrian Mutu could provide it.
The goal Crespo did get followed a corner from Duff on the right and a firm header by John Terry which the Argentinian diverted past Jussi Jaaskelainen. Crespo's positioning was astute but he should have scored more.
The turning point of the game, six minutes before half-time, owed something to the flight of Youri Djorkaeff's free kick from the right and a lot to Bruno N'Gotty's leap and the strength of his header. At the same time the Chelsea defence remained strangely earthbound.
From then on if Bolton did not seriously entertain thoughts of victory they clearly believed they would not lose. The ability of Jay-Jay Okocha, Ivan Campo and Djorkaeff to hold the ball eased the pressure on their defence and once a weary-looking Frank Lampard had given way to Geremi Chelsea looked pedestrian.
The longer the second half progressed the more able Bolton were to carry the game to their opponents. Chelsea had a couple of narrow squeaks but with the match about to go into stoppage time Johnson allowed Henrik Pedersen, who had just replaced Djorkaeff, to slip past him on the left and in attempting to intercept the Dane's modest cross-shot Terry deflected the ball into his own net.
"We must score more goals when we have the opportunity," Ranieri sighed.
Said Allardyce: "Last week we had six chances (at Fulham) and lost whereas we barely had two today and took them." Simple really.
