Chelsea scramble to lucky win

Chelsea supporters still roused by the excitement of the victory over Vicenza were treated to a good old cup of bromide yesterday…

Chelsea supporters still roused by the excitement of the victory over Vicenza were treated to a good old cup of bromide yesterday.

A performance as appalling as Thursday's was enthralling ended in victory via a dubious penalty which leaves Chelsea creditably primed to finish third in the table. But it served little other purpose for them than to highlight the problems Gianluca Vialli faces in realising his aim of trumping this season's success by eventually winning the Premiership.

Chelsea have already booked a European place for next season and this was the fourth time in five games that the player-manager had made seven changes to his team.

So some lack of cohesion was understandable. But this disjointed display could not hide the underlying problem his players have in bringing to the bread-and-butter games the same passion and quality which made them the toast of England four days ago.

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Vialli afterwards argued that at least his team had won without playing well, which in his view was a step forward. But, without two strokes of luck and that penalty, Chelsea might have lost.

Consistency is the key to the title and the lack of it at Chelsea has proved the difference between their current position in the table and what might have been.

The other potential danger to their ongoing growth is the acrimonious split between Ken Bates and Ruud Gullit which, if it gets much further out of hand, could affect club morale in the way that the chairman's spat with the late Matthew Harding did.

In his recently published autobiography Gullit accused Bates of sacking him because he was jealous of his - Gullit's - popularity and said Bates hid behind others when bringing down the axe.

Yesterday Bates upped the stakes further by calling Gullit "a part-time playboy manager" whom the club were not prepared to pay huge amounts of money while he "carried out his lucrative commercial contracts at the expense of his training".

Life at Chelsea is never smooth, even on the pitch. Yesterday's 90 minutes of silent observation from Stamford Bridge's lowest league crowd this season of 29,075 stood out in stark contrast to the noisy emotions of Thursday's full house.

And when Chelsea needed the sort of rousing second-half performance which overwhelmed Vicenza it, too, was missing. A scrappy, niggly game contained few chances, though Sheffield Wednesday, who are still not safe from relegation and have now suffered six away defeats in a row, twice hit the woodwork.

On 12 minutes, Petter Rudi took the ball round Dmitri Kharine but blasted his shot against the angle of an open goal and 14 minutes later the busy Benito Carbone produced a spectacular overhead kick out of nothing which the bar prevented from being one of the goals of the season.

However, in between all this it was Chelsea who got the break when Earl Barrett was adjudged to have brought down Tore Andre Flo on the left of the area when most observers felt the Wednesday defender had fairly played the ball.

"If that was a penalty I'll plait sawdust," said Ron Atkinson afterwards. "For me he's won the ball, clean as a whistle. Obviously there was only one person in the ground who thought it was a penalty."

But referee Gary Willard's was the opinion which counted and Frank Leboeuf duly scored what turned out to be the winner from the spot, Chelsea's 100th goal of the season.

Di Canio later worked room for a crisp shot which Kharine did well to push away, but that was about it - so different from Thursday night. This time Mark Hughes was booked and the fans were making their frustrated way to the exits long before the end.