Skip to main content

Made in Mourinho's image: Terry, Costa & Co. kickstart new Chelsea era

COMMENT: The Blues are on course to secure a domestic double after they triumphed in the League Cup final with a 2-0 victory against rivals Tottenham
By Greg Stobart at Wembley Stadium
John Terry once again lifted a trophy after a cup final wearing his full kit - but this time there is no need for internet jokes about the Chelsea captain.
You don't have to like him - a lot of football fans don't - but Terry showed why he is still one of the best around as he inspired Chelsea to glory in the League Cup final against rivals Tottenham here.
The Blues captain missed the Champions League final in 2012 and Europa League final a year later - but still donned his kit to lift the trophies, to much hilarity.
This time he climbed the steps in this famous stadium as a matchwinner after scoring Chelsea's opener just before half-time and leading the defence to a clean sheet in a classic Jose Mourinho-inspired performance.
It was not often pretty from west Londoners but the end result - their first trophy since Mourinho's return to the club - will have looked beautiful to the 31,000 Chelsea fans as they danced in the north London rain.
In the end, it was a comfortable victory for Mourinho's men, especially once they doubled their lead in the 56th minute through Kyle Walker's own goal as the Spurs defender deflected Diego Costa's strike into his own net.
For Mourinho, this is a first trophy in two and a half years and his first since returning to Chelsea in 2013. As he punched the air before the final whistle had even been blown, Mourinho's old swagger returned after his sour-faced complaints about officials, pundits and virtually everything else in recent weeks.
If last year he liked to portray his side as the "little horse", the team that he put out at Wembley were thoroughbreds, even without the suspended Nemanja Matic who was replaced brilliantly by Kurt Zouma.

Comments

Ezoic

Popular posts from this blog

How to make any workout feel easier

How you feel during training is not always a reflection of how fit you are. If you know just how to manage it and use a variety of mental tricks you don’t just get to feel better than you would otherwise, you will be performing better, doing more and work out harder. Fitness is, mostly, inside your head. It’s first of all a mental battle you need to win in order to make yourself train, make yourself train on the level you need to, and then to continue doing it time and time again. Once you do get yourself to exercise, there are a few tricks you can use to make the whole process easier on yourself: Don’t think about how hard it is. We often concentrate too much on how difficult and challenging training is, magnifying it in our head, all the while struggling more and more with the load. The more you think about yourself not being able to cope, the harder it feels. Essentially this is the pre-game pep-talk technique, applied to your training routine: Keep telling yourself that what you ar...

Wenger and Arsenal stuck together in defeat

COMMENT: Wednesday's 3-1 defeat to Monaco has left the Frenchman on the brink of his most embarrassing European exit and the sense is of a coach who has reached his ceiling By Liam Twomey As the dust settled on another   Arsenal   humiliation and criticism poured in from all sides, the most damning words of all flowed from   Arsene Wenger . He spoke of “suicidal” defending, a collective loss of nerve and the heart ruling the head before touching on a favourite theme. “Mentally we were not ready or sharp enough to get into this game,” he admitted. “We paid for it.”   Mentality is something Wenger talks about a lot, in victory and defeat. Nor is it idle talk – renowned French psychologist Jacques Crevoisier has regularly been employed to work with Arsenal players in recent years, and in 2010 he subjected the entire squad to a psychometric test designed to measure all the mental qualities required of an elite athlete. Nicklas Bendtner famously scored 10 out of nine for ...

Fitness and Hydration

Nearly 80% of our body is made up of water at birth. When something in our biological make up takes up so much volume the chances are it plays a critical role in our neurobiology which also means it affects every aspect of our fitness. By the time we reach maturity water levels have stabilized to 65% for adult males and 55% for adult females which suggests that water continues to be critical throughout our lives, so the question is how much should we drink in order to be fit and healthy?  Depending on where you look and who you ask the answers are going to be either up to eight glasses a day or less than eight glasses a day. Those who say we don’t drink enough also cite evidence that water helps our metabolism stay active, boosts our brain power and helps athletic performance while the critics claim that too much water makes us stupid, it can seriously depletes sodium levels in our bloodstream impairing athletic performance and can, in extreme cases, also kill us.  Both camps ...