There was an odd interlude at Stamford Bridge with 76 minutes gone and the score still 0-0, one of those moments where suddenly your brain seems to be on inside out, like trying to walk the wrong way down an escalator. Tottenham had a corner on the left-hand side, in a game that had felt to that point like an extended practice session, a refinement of systems, the football equivalent of watching two middle-aged men methodically emptying the dishwasher, adding salt, descaling the hoses, tutting over knives incorrectly slotted, cups in the wrong row. Fittingly it took a glitch in the coding to break this game open.
Austin MacPhee, Chelsea’s set-piece coach, was, as ever, up on his touchline semaphoring his instructions. Except this time he was ordering Chelsea players out of their own box. We need fewer people defending.
We must, for some reason, vacate that space and initiate some kind of counterattack chess game. This had already happened at another corner on 52 minutes. On that occasion 10 players were arranged in various upfield positions, leaving just a small gaggle in the box doing the actual try-to-score stuff.
The ball landed in one of the huge vacant spaces. It seems like one of those things that just happens and you don’t know how or why, like driverless cars, or Howard Webb suddenly having his own ref-based TV show. But it was decisive here.
The second corner came howling in right through that vacated area. Again it looked strange, not least on a wet, blustery day, the kind of day where the rain just seems to want to get inside the neck of your coat, up your trouser turn-ups, in your pockets. The ball kept travelling, right through all that open space.
At which point Mike Penders punched it into his own net. MacPhee came to Chelsea in the summer after the club activated his release clause at Aston Villa, the most remarkable part of which is that the bloke who waves at corners actually has a release clause (fee: undisclosed). Here his response to the goal was to walk pensively down the touchline, stroking his chin.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
