Chelsea line up

The model for tomorrow will presumably be the home defeat of United or draw with Liverpool. Tight in midfield and defiant in defence. As such, I presume we'll go with Hamann, Johnson and Gelson through the middle (obviously Elano did start in the hole against United, but that was when he deserved to) - in theory our most solid central midfield three (even though they were poor at Reading). The case for keeping Stephen Ireland in central midfield is not particularly strong on recent showings.

Unless SGE gambles on Caicedo or Sturridge up front, Benjani will keep his place. And with a flu free Petrov back on the left, we're back to our favourite task: attempting to crow-bar a series of central midfielders, left wingers and forwards into right midfield. Elano? Ireland? Geovanni? Castillo? Vassell? Elano probably deserves it, but Chelsea are strong enough for that to be used against him. Castillo and Geovanni are both seemingly out of favour, and Ireland hasn't impressed from out wide for some time. So we're left with Vassell. The presumption ought to be that his poor performances would see him dropped, but I'm long past thinking there's any correlation between his form and his selection. Seemingly, if we're playing a team at all better than us then we need hard workers so we pick him. Or if we're playing a team at all worse than us, then we need hard workers, and so we pick him. This is proved by the one time we played a team roughly as good as us - Tottenham - we were able to drop him. How did that game finish again?