And with that, I’m done. Bye! Oh, and here’s a match report:
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Gary Cahill has a chat:
It was a job done, as they say. It’s important we go out motivated to get the three points. We tried and we tried and we got what I thought we deserved. But they did make it difficult for us. Delighted, job done.
It’s great [that Morata scored]. I’m sure every striker knows scoring goals give them confidence. He made some good runs tonight. I think the significance of the goal, it was a match-winner, will give him confidence. We’re delighted that we won, and delighted he scored.
I want to play football, like everybody else. I’m no different. The ambition never changes. So I’m delighted to be back out there and to have the armband back on.
While you wait for your match report, here’s some bonus Europa League reading for you:
Vidi go to thank their fans, and receive a noisy ovation. For all that they were really quite lucky to still be in the game at half-time, this was a fine away performance and on several occasions in the minutes before both half- and full time they very nearly scored.
Updated
Morata, who has looked happy at no point tonight, even after he scored, strops off the pitch after the final whistle. The idea that he would be suddenly rejuvenated by a single goal has been dispelled by his reaction to it when it came.
Final score: Chelsea 1-0 Vidi
90+4 mins: No.
90+3 mins: Vinicius finally wins it, and Vidi push forward. Could they?
90+3 mins: It’s the last minute of stoppage time, and Chelsea are selfishly hogging the ball, passing it all around the pitch.
90+1 mins: Morata wins the header, and Chelsea clear.
90+1 mins: Into stoppage time, and it will start with a Vidi free kick, just to the right of the area, after Zappacosta fouled Scepovic.
90 mins: Emerson leads a good break, and Hazard slides the ball across the area to Barkley, whose shot deflects wide.
87 mins: Oooh! Morata takes the ball to the byline and hits it across goal, where nobody gets the tiny touch it would have taken to prod it over the line!
Updated
85 mins: Now Nego has a pop, but from 35 yards yard he hammers the ball way over the bar.
83 mins: Nearly an equaliser! Kovacs runs onto the ball in the area from the right, collects a fine reverse pass, and hits a decent shot with the outside of his right foot towards the far corner. Kepa, though, gets down well to push it out, and Moses clears!
Updated
82 mins: Two more Vidi substitutions. Hodzic replaces Milanov, and Patkai replaces Hadzic. That concludes the evening’s substitutional activity.
80 mins: There has been no opening of the floodgates since the goal, but there has been a significant lessening of intensity.
77 mins: Vidi take off Huszti and bring on Istvan Kovacs.
77 mins: Hazard crosses, Barkley heads, and the ball hits the crossbar and rebounds to safety!
76 mins: Emerson wins a free-kick on the left touchline. A second goal will surely kill this.
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73 mins: Chelsea’ final substitution sees Willian depart and Moses arrive.
72 mins: Nearly another! Hazard dribbles into the area and then surprises Barkley by passing to him, and the Englishman, stretching and falling, shoots into Morata.
70 mins: And it’s a lovely finish! Fabregas lifts the ball into the area, Willian flicks it on and Morata, who could hardly miss, volleys it smartly past Tujvel.
Updated
GOAL! Chelsea 1-0 Vidi (Morata, 70 mins)
He’s actually scored an actual goal!
68 mins: Morata runs into the area but Paulo Vinicius gets in his way. He wants a penalty again, but gets only a corner.
67 mins: Barkley spears a shot at goal from just outside the area, which Tujvel saves.
66 mins: Morata is caught on the chest inside the penalty area. He holds his lip and complains about it to the referee for so long that he gets booked.
66 mins: Loftus-Cheek comes off having not really grasped his opportunity tonight, and Barkley comes on.
“Vidi would be ‘I saw’ in Latin, as in Veni Vidi Vici, wouldn’t it?” muses Andrew Benton. “Surely Vici would be a much better name for some would-be giant conquerors.” The problem is that Latin conjugation would ruin everything. If teams are referred to in the third person plural, you’d be left with (according to Google) Venientes, Viderunt, Vici. Which doesn’t really work so well.
63 mins: Milanov runs into space on the right, and while three defenders run towards him Nikolov runs free on the left. Milanov spots him, but overhits his chipped pass, and Vidi end up with nothing but a corner.
61 mins: Milanov tries a Salah-esque left-footed curler across goal towards the far corner. It flies well high.
57 mins: Hadzic is very harshly penalised for handball, after Loftus-Cheek flicked the ball up into him. Free kick, but it was right on the very edgiest edge of the area, so it could have been worse.
56 mins: Milanov is booked for touching Willian’s shoulders.
56 mins: Fabregas lifts the ball into the area, where Morata and Juhasz run shoulder-to-shoulder towards it and fall over each other. Goal kick.
Updated
54 mins: Cometh the six-minutes-before-the-hour, cometh the man: Eden Hazard is on, and Pedro goes off.
52 mins: When the ball is sent in Morata gets his eyebrows to it, and it hits a defender and bounces wide.
51 mins: Loftus-Cheek is taken out by the scarlet-haired Stopira, and Chelsea have a free kick on the right wing.
50 mins: Chelsea win a corner, which is headed behind for another corner, which is headed behind for another corner, which is flapped away by the keeper and vaguely cleared.
47 mins: Save! And it’s Vidi, and Nego, with the effort! The ball drops to him inside the area and his shot is walloped across goal and was on its way in before Kepa got his hands to it!
46 mins: And they’re off! Again!
The players are back out!
“Any chance of getting Greaves back for this game?” wonders Tom. If only. A goal is surely coming, though it’s been obviously coming for so long now that it is becoming increasingly possible that in the end it won’t.
Good insight here. But what about the novelty ice cream flavours?
@Simon_Burnton Had the pleasure of working is Szekesfehervar for 18 months. Small city with a lovely central area. Formerly the seat of the Magyar kings. Lots of events including a folk dance festival, open-air music and a day when people cook stew over open fires. Worth a visit.
— T ShrapnelCarruthers #FBPE (@TarquinSC) October 4, 2018
Half time: Chelsea 0 Vidi 0
45+1 mins: After four seconds of stoppage time, the first half is over.
Updated
45 mins: Willian’s free-kick is deflected wide, and a madcap first half is on the verge of ending ridiculously goalless.
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44 mins: Another booking, this for Huszti, who brings down Kovacic.
43 mins: And another Vidi chance! Nego gets past Emerson’s poor challenge, cuts nicely onto his left foot and then feathers a weak shot straight at Kepa.
41 mins: Nikolov is played into the area, Cahill goes to ground in an attempt to get the ball and fails to do so, and now Vidi want a penalty! Perhaps it should have been a free-kick, with contact taking place just outside the box, but instead Vidi get nothing at all.
Updated
40 mins: Vidi play the ball long from the right wing. Christensen holds off Nego and expects Kepa to collect it, but the goalkeeper stays on his line and the No11 nips in and from no distance pokes just wide!
39 mins: Loftus-Cheek dances into the area, skips past several challenges and then falls under challenge from Paulo Vinicius. It’s right in front of the penalty-area-based assistant referee, with nobody in his way, and is basically a rugby tackle, but the officials somehow fail to spot it.
Updated
36 mins: Chelsea win a corner, and then another corner. When the second is headed clear, Zappacosta smacks a shot into Row Z from 25 yards.
34 mins: Vidi have the ball in Chelsea’s penalty area! Kepa gathers it, and Fiola arrives late and, well, it would be unfair to say he kicked him, but he walked into him, or was headbutted in the shin. Kepa briefly looks to be injured, but it turns out he was pretending.
32 mins: The intensity of Chelsea’s attacking has faded somewhat over the last few minutes. Still, they swing the ball into the area and win a corner.
29 mins: Vidi try to attack! The ball is chipped over the home defence, but Kepa comes out and catches it.
27 mins: It’s chipped forward to Morata, who is nudged by Hadzic at the vital moment and falls over.
Updated
26 mins: A Chelsea goal has been imminent for about 23 minutes. They have a free kick, bang central and 35 yards out.
25 mins: After good work in the build-up Morata is found by Zappacosta’s low cross, but his attempt to turn it in is tentative and deflected wide.
Updated
23 mins: A shot on target! Pedro curls it in from 25 yards, but it’s straight at Tujvel.
20 mins: Emerson gets to the byline on the left but wildly overhits his cross. It shouldn’t matter, because Fiola slid in to try to stop him and totally took him out after the ball had gone. For some reason, though, nobody seemed to mind.
19 mins: Chelsea are hogging possession and hammering upon the door quite insistently. Emerson thrashes a 40-yarder way wide.
16 mins: Incredible crazy mad wild bizarre nonsense miss! Fabregas pokes the ball through to Morata, whose marker left him to close the midfielder down and is thus completely free inside the penalty area. He controls, spins, draws the goalkeeper and sidefoots wide!
Updated
14 mins: Nego has been booked for tugging Loftus-Cheek’s shirt so hard it tore. The referee has sent the Chelsea player off to change into an intact shirt, leaving the home side temporarily down to 10 men.
14 mins: And another! This isn’t such a great chance, but Kovacic had time to size up a shot from the edge of the area, but blazed over.
12 mins: Another chance! Pedro picks up a defensive header, spins and then pokes through to Willian, who instead of shooting with his right foot cuts onto his left, giving the defence time to crowd around him and deflect his shot to safety. Pretty much every decision made by Willian so far has been wrong.
10 mins: Chance! Emerson cuts in from the left, runs between a pair of defenders, runs between another pair of defenders and then, with only the goalkeeper to beat, blazes over!
9 mins: Chelsea break from the second corner, and Pedro plays the ball to Willian on the left. He dwells on it for a while, waits until he was surrounded by defenders, and then hits a shot into one of them.
Updated
8 mins: Then the corner is headed by Juhasz into the back of a defender, and loops towards the corner of the net until Emerson heads it over. Kepa would surely have caught it had he not done so.
7 min: Milanov gallops into all sorts of space on the left wing with Zappacosta caught downfield, but Cahill cuts out his cross.
4 mins: Fabregas tries to pick out Morata in the penalty area but he can’t weave it through a thicket of defensive legs. Chelsea have a high defensive line, and Vidi’s is very, very deep.
3 mins: The highlight of the game so far is Vidi having a player caught offside.
1 min: And they’re off!
The players are out and have completed the pre-match formalities. Football imminent.
35 - Chelsea have never lost a single home European match (excluding qualifiers) in a competition other than the Champions League (P35 W28 D7 L0).
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) October 4, 2018
Oh. I’ve got nothing against Greaves, obviously. I just think it’s a poor choice of dressing-room quote. You might as well have “Woke up it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I heard was a song outside my window”, or any other random phrase including the word Chelsea.
@Simon_Burnton I have decided that you are a scoundrel and cad after reading your opening salvo about Mr Greaves quote at Chelsea in the Guardian, a pox on your house Burnton #COYB
— tom (@tomgor) October 4, 2018
The players are in the tunnel!
A peek inside Chelsea’s dressing room before all the players arrived and messed it up. The quote on the wall is from Jimmy Greaves: “It’s probably the greatest name in the world, Chelsea. You think about it. It conjures up the best part of the biggest city in the world.” Three thoughts:
- I am not very inspired by that quote. It is about a name. Someone once said their name was nice. It is not about football, bravery, history or indefatigable human spirit. Surely they could do better? If it has to come from a legendary former player, they could just write something better themselves and ask John Terry to say it.
- The best (aka poshest) part of the biggest city in the world is probably Azabu, Tokyo. It depends how you define biggest, of course, and how you define best, but whatever definitions you use the best part of the biggest city in the world is definitely not Chelsea. London hasn’t been the biggest city in the world since, at the very latest, the mid-20th century, and is widely agreed to have been usurped before Greaves was born.
- If Greaves really thought Chelsea was the greatest name in the world, why did he name his children Jimmy, Lynn, Mitzi, Danny and Andrew? Huh?
Updated
The main headline from the team selections is that Ruben Loftus-Cheek makes his first Chelsea start since an FA Cup tie against Brentford in January 2017.
Teams
Chelsea: Kepa, Zappacosta, Cahill, Christensen, Emerson, Loftus-Cheek, Fabregas, Kovacic, Pedro, Morata, Willian. Subs: Alonso, Kante, Barkley, Hazard, Caballero, Moses, Ampadu.
Vidi: Tujvel, Fiola, Juhadz, Paulo Vinicius, Stopira, Nego, Hadzic, Nikolov, Huszti, Milanov, Scepovic. Subs: Kovacs, Berecz, Hodzic, Patkai, Tamas, Hangya, Kovacsik.
Referee: Miroslav Zelinka (Cze).
Updated
Hello world!
I believe that many readers might require a beginner’s guide to Vidi. Known as Videoton until earlier this year, Vidi’s greatest footballing achievement was reaching the 1985 Uefa Cup final, where they humbled Real Madrid 1-0 at the Bernabeu (having lost 3-0 at home in the first leg). They won the Nemzeti Bajnokság I, Hungary’s top division, for the third time (having first won it in 2010-11) last season.
Vidi hail from Székesfehérvár, a town of some 100,000 people in western Hungary commonly known as Ferhervar. According to their official webpage, Székesfehérvár is home to the 2014 Cake of the Year, the 2013 Ice Cream of the Year (red wine and raspberry, since you ask) and also the ice cream that came third in 2014 (the delectable-sounding raspberry-lime curd cheese almond crispy), all of these accolades coming in the Hungarian Confectioners National Guild awards. As for that cake, apparently “the dark chocolate mousse layered onto the nut-brittle and then the vanilla flavoured white chocolate froth-cream covered with ganache placed over an orange layer gives such an experience for the taste-buds that can be rightly called revolutionary”.
All this information comes from the town’s informative website, which tells me that its highlights include “the apparent remains of a medieval castle”, a town centre “that has been destroyed and renewed again and again”, several “paramount examples of national architecture” and a fine basilica. They also look ahead to this game, when “a sure-fire bomber team is waiting for Vidi on Thursday night at Stamford Bridge’s presumably crowded stadium”. Let’s hope so!
