The endgame phase has arrived for the Barclays Premier League season. Dormant hierarchies are reasserting themselves, and short-term hopes are dashed. With seven games left, Everton are now the only club with a chance of breaking into the traditional top four, and the big-club intramurals last weekend saw Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal and [...]

Dimitar Berbatov taking the penalty kick that drew Spurs level in the Carling Cup final yesterday: coolness so pronounced that it almost seemed rude to Chelsea, a matter-of-fact confidence taken to the point at which it began to resemble arrogant detachment. It was as if Berbatov felt such scorn for the thought that Petr [...]

In myth and in the funny pages, tiny wiseguys with magic somewhere in them baffle and humiliate the sergeants and leashed bulldogs of the world. They find an ally and representative in Joe Cole, the Puck, Peter Pan, Bugs Bunny and Odysseus of Chelsea, the Artful Dodger, the Puss in Boots, the handful of [...]

Chelsea have just completed a £15 million move for Nicolas Anelka, bringing in a famously temperamental and disloyal French-speaking striker to replace…well, Didier Drogba. I think we can safely assume that the net effect on team chemistry will not be profound.
Actually, this is a really interesting move for football reasons (how will Anelka fit [...]

The Structure of His Face
Is in three layers, with each outer layer fitting slightly too largely over the layer it contains, so that the overall shape is one of sculptural creasing and drape, like the skirt of the Winged Victory. At the far-underneath level, the skeleton level, his head is fox-sleek and trim, but [...]

What with the big news about Fabio Capello agreeing to manage a team that even he won't be able to overload with Dutchmen, the revelation that Avram Grant signed a new four-year contract with Chelsea yesterday has sort of been swept under the rug. That's too bad, because Grant's success has been one of [...]

It's never with a feeling of great moral comfort that you can get excited about a player's injury, but at the same time, if Didier Drogba's now-surgically-repaired knee broke away from Chelsea and founded its own three-ring circus, the only surprising thing about it would be the girth of the bearded lady. It's got [...]

The element of "spirit" in football can be perceived in this: that when he played for Milan, Andriy Shevchenko looked bigger, I mean physically bigger, than he is, and now, playing for Chelsea, he looks smaller than he is; as though, wherever we were sitting when we saw him before, we've moved fifteen rows back. [...]

For American fans of the Premier League, seeing matches means waking up early, sometimes to make the cold walk to some local bar or self-styled Irish pub to share a euthanasia breakfast with a plasma screen and a handful of European exiles, sometimes to wage a sleepy war with Chinese streaming software in the hope [...]