Chelsea pip 10-man (for a few minutes) Charlton

Chelsea 2 Charlton 1


Souleymane Diawara made his debut, too; the gloves look quite normal to me...

I suppose I hadn't expected Charlton to win this; people don't expect their clubs to come away from Stamford Bridge with much, and yet last season Charlton did come away with a point, after the league encounter, and after winning on penalties, a ticket through to the next round of the League Cup (not sure who sponsors it - is it still Coca Cola? It's not Milk, anyway).

So, like The Inspector, who wrote that he had not been prepared to spend £48 just to sit in a tin shed at the wrong end of the Fulham Road, and who admitted to actually being in bed asleep during the first half, I also elected to lie down and read. Suffering from the beginnings of a cold and also nursing a slight hangover as I was, I actually fell asleep and didn't get round to checking the results until 35 minutes after full time. At first glance, 2-1 didn't seem too bad. OK, no points, but no disgrace.

And in fact it wasn't really till Sunday that I found myself making the rounds of the various reports. Obviously even the most pro-Charlton writers could not get round the fact that Chelsea had run out the winners, but I am now convinced that it was a much more close-run thing than some would have had us believe. The BBC implied that Chelsea had run riot, without bothering to explain why the score was only 2-1, but then sort of went back on themselves and admitted that Charlton made much more of a game of it in the second half, which is what the Charlton bloggers seem to agree on.

Another source reported that Chelsea 'cruised to victory'; this is just plain wrong; in my book no one can cruise anywhere unless there is a clear 3-goal difference; which there wasn't; it was 1-1 for a while.

Amy Lawrence in The Observer allowed herself to be distracted by the fact that Ashley Cole came on after 64 minutes and made his Chelsea debut. She devoted quite a lot of her report to this event. In fact it was round about this stage in the game that Charlton's newest and fifth most expensive (ever) signing, Souleymane Diawara, went off. He'd been making his debut as well, but nowhere have I seen even a passing reference to this, except, to be fair, in Amy's report, in which she noted that he was wearing "wolly gloves", whatever they might be.

And it was while he was off injured, and Charlton down to 10 men, that Chelsea scored their second, and winning, goal.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if it had been the other way round, and Chelsea had conceded a Charlton winning goal while temporarily reduced to 10 men. Would the management and directors of Chelsea be banging on the doors of FIFA headquarters to get this kind of thing put a stop to? I think Mr Kenyon and company very well might. And there certainly would be a lot of comment in the media about it, but of course it was Charlton who were down to 10 men when the goal was conceded, so it was hardly mentioned; I didn't even find out about it till late last night, perusing what might have been the ninth match report I looked at.

As things were, Charlton went on to equalise, but it was disallowed, and then Scott Carson saved a Lampard penalty. So there we are, no points, but no disgrace either. Three points from four matches, and games against Man Utd and Chelsea in amongst those. Well I am not expecting Charlton to win the ruddy Premiership, but there does not seem to be any reason to start panicking yet awhile, either.