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Bicycle thieves

Bicycle thieves

There’s not much you can do but stand, applaud and admire the bicycle kick that stole two points from Chelsea at Brighton… scored by a man with more aitches than a Scrabble set. When Alireza Jahanbakhsh beat Kepa Arrizabalaga with that overhead kick to win the Seagulls a draw and cancel out captain Cesar Azpilicueta’s

There’s not much you can do but stand, applaud and admire the bicycle kick that stole two points from Chelsea at Brighton… scored by a man with more aitches than a Scrabble set.

When Alireza Jahanbakhsh beat Kepa Arrizabalaga with that overhead kick to win the Seagulls a draw and cancel out captain Cesar Azpilicueta’s opener, it was one of those occasions when you had to simply shrug.

Manager Frank Lampard, now looking ahead to Sunday’s FA Cup clash with Forest, blamed Chelsea’s lack of ruthlessness for not killing off a game that they had at their mercy, but – to be fair – that’s so often been the situation in the past few months that it’s barely worth repeating.

When Chelsea fail to kill off a ‘single goal’ game, they suffer. And when opponents get a 1-0 lead against Chelsea, that (more often than not) is that. The glittering exception was at the Emirates, when Arsenal tired and frittered away the lead they were clinging to.

“It is two points dropped for us because in the first half, if we’re ruthless, then the game is out of sight,” said Lampard, after paying tribute to the beauty of that bicycle kick.

“We had multiple chances, we had control, we had opportunities to play people in that could score and to make decisions around the box to score, but we allowed them to feel they were still in the game.

“Today was a lack of quality on the ball. We had a situation in the first half where we knew the problem for them, we could find our full-backs easily and keep the ball easily, but then we just decided not to keep doing those simple things.

“They matched up with us slightly in the second half, so then it becomes ‘Are you better than us or are we better than you?’ We didn’t do enough at that point. It was a collective in terms of the lowering in quality of our game today.”

Lampard did, however, single out N’Golo Kante, Kepa and Toni Rudiger for individual praise… but it’s that lack of ruthlessness that Nottingham Forest will be looking to exploit on Sunday in the FA Cup 3rd Round.

 

 

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