Pat Nevin: Beyond the pale

It might have been a holiday weekend for some but not for the team nor our columnist Pat Nevin who has been keeping a close eye on the Blues, as he reports here… It has been an exhausting week and I am sure a little sympathy is due. On Tuesday I flew to London for a radio show, stayed over for the Benfica game on Chelsea TV on Wednesday, and interviewed our CEO Ron Gourlay for BBC World Service at the club on Thursday morning before covering the Athletic Bilbao v Schalke game on Channel 5 Thursday night. Friday morning I flew back north for my three-hour Five Live evening radio show with Colin Murray. After a brief visit home it was up to Glasgow again for a TV show on Saturday and Sunday before off down to London yet again next morning to cover the Fulham v Blues game for Chelsea TV. Then it is back up to Scotland again and a brief visit to remind my family what I look like before off again to cover Man City v West Brom….and the Chelsea players think they are tired!! Actually they are maybe feeling the pace a bit and rightly so. Since last week's article they have played three games and managed impressive victories against Benfica and Wigan before dragging their bodies on to Craven Cottage for the Fulham game. There was of course the rather fantastic news beforehand that Spurs had tripped up yet again, this time at home to Norwich City. So it was set up at Craven Cottage for the great comeback to continue. Sadly Chelsea seemed to finally run out of steam with some pretty below-par performances on an awful night weather-wise. After five minutes play the players looked as drenched as the protester who disrupted the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race at the weekend. It was bound to happen at some point but even so they nearly nicked all three points, which to be fair would have been pretty unfair on Fulham who probably deserved the point on balance. With Fernando, Ramires and Kalou failing to keep possession there was no platform to build on and it turned out to be amongst the most disjointed performances of the season. Frank Lampard was in my mind immense with his work rate but even his goal wasn't enough to convince me that we deserved to finish at 1-0. The ever-dependable Dempsey once more showed that he is the worst kept secret currently playing in the Premier League today. Other Chelsea players looked jaded, Branislav Ivanovic was hounded by John Arne Riise all night and he looked as though he couldn't wait to go home and soak those aching limbs by the end of the game. Maybe he had a little injury and that was why he looked a bit heavy legged. That would not be a surprise. Players at the professional level rarely ever play at 100% fitness, as the season progresses there are niggling injuries that just do not get the time to clear up. Whether it is a twisted ankle that has to be strapped up to secure it, to an aching knee that can't be rested, you just learn to live with them, but they do slow you down as time goes by. Eventually a rest is needed and more often than not the player himself is the last one to accept it. Just look at John Terry just now, cracked ribs usually have most normal human beings lying in a darkened room, refusing to move unless they are picking up the cup of tea that has been delivered to their bedside by their long-suffering partners. JT on a departure from the norm played against Aston Villa and then Benfica at home after breaking his ribs in the first leg. Now we all know that the skipper is made of a different material from the rest of us mere mortals but surely that is him going beyond the pale…again. Then again apart from the excruciating pain and the inability to breath, it hardly affected him. Most players don't however continue to play on at that level of discomfort, in fact there are those in the past here that took a fortnight off for a broken toenail, but I digress. The point is simply that the games are coming along like me on the 737 to London City Airport this morning, thick and fast. Robbie has done a fantastic job rotating the team and getting the best out of them as he does it. This is to my mind one of the toughest jobs in football. It does however worry me that eventually at one point the pressure of three competitions at this stage in the season will have an effect. Managing this problem is the trickiest job the interim coach will have before now and the end of the season, though there is a decent argument that finding a way to beat Barcelona over two legs trumps every other challenge worldwide in the game right now. We can worry about that later, in simple terms it is seven points out of nine. Monday was better for Chelsea than it was for Spurs and we await the contest on Sunday. Let's hope everyone is well rested before then. Last week's quiz seems like a long, long time ago, well it was three games ago I suppose. I wanted to know who was the most capped Portuguese international who has played for Chelsea. Some of you went for Deco and some of you went for Ricardo Carvalho and it was…wait for it…drum roll….actually it was both of them who managed 75 caps each. So you are all right, well those that named either of those two anyway. There is only one winner allowed so this time I have asked Jason Cundy, who is sitting next to me as I write, to randomly choose the winner and it is Ailsa Burrow from St John's Wood in London. To have a chance of winning the quiz this week and a DVD collection of Chelsea FA Cup Finals, signed by John Terry, answer this question. Fulham have only beaten Chelsea once in the past 32 years. When was it and who scored?