Hello folks! Since my Chester is a Premier League club now I thought that I should post more frequently, giving you updates once every 5 league games played. If you have other suggestions please let me know.
Here we go… After a busy pre season in which I signed 21 players I felt that the squad was ready for the challenge of avoiding relegation. The friendly games however didn’t go very well overall, 2 wins, 2 draws and 2 losses.
The 3-2 home victory over Portsmouth made us more optimistic though. The first Premier League game was just around the corner, at home versus Blackburn Rovers.
Matchday 1: Chester City — Blackburn Rovers 2-1
The first game, the first victory! Everybody was thrilled, but I was worried because we wore more than lucky to have won the game. Blackburn dominated in front of goal, although we managed to have a better ball posession, 55 percent of the time. Anyway, it was a great start.
Matchday 2: Tottenham — Chester 1-2
We were on fire! We led Tottenham 1-0 at the break, they equalised and we pulled it off right in the dying seconds! A wonderful victory in a match we dominated for large periods of time. 6 points out of 6, it couldn’t have started better than this.
Carling Cup 2nd Round: Blackpool — Chester 0-2
Obviously we couldn’t make any mistakes against lower league Blackpool, and we didn’t. We didn’t give them any chance to threaten us and walked away with a solid win. Unfortunately the 3rd round draw wasn’t very good for us: we’re going to play against Chelsea :(
Matchday 3: Chester City — Fulham 3-1
I expected a difficult game and it really was. Fulham had a better posession but a great performance from our strikers, specially Luke Moore, brought us another great victory. Relegation seemed far away, but there was still a long way to go.
Matchday 4: Liverpool — Chester 2-0
The odds were against us, they had way better players, they didn’t give us many chances, but still… It was a nightmare to score two own goals in a single game, that never happened to me before. Well, the first defeat came, we couldn’t avoid it.
Matchday 5: Chester City — Q.P.R. 2-1
Another home game, another 2-1 win. Last season Q.P.R. were our rivals in Coca-Cola Championship, they finished 2nd, we went to the playoff. Despite that we won the home game against them last year too, so the result wasn’t surprising for me. We had 12 points, we were 3rd in the Premier League after 5 games!
The player that made a difference in this early season period was pacey striker Luke Moore. I bought him from Dundee United for around 300 K hoping that he will be our top goalscorer and so far he didn’t disappoint me: 5 games, 3 goals, 3 assists, 2 Man of The Match awards and a 7.50 average rating. I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for his health, it would be a blow to lose him due to injuries.
That’s it for now, I’ll be reporting back after another 5 league games. Wish me luck!
