Chelsea Women 1-0 Crystal Palace
Chelsea Men 1-0 Leicester City
Fans clapped clappers in a boisterous display of support for their Chelsea heroes as Lauren James propelled her Kingsmeadow teammates through to the semi-finals of the FA Cup with a left-footed strike past Crystal Palace goalie Shae Yanez.
The lip-smacking prospect: a home game against Liverpool. In the other semi, the two Manchester giants meet each other.
The Blues' hierarchy are now debating when and where to stage the semi-final. One possibility is to use Stamford Bridge for the game, on Saturday 12 April. But that would involve moving the men's match against Ipswich back a day to 13 April.
It took 64 minutes for LJ's boot to make the difference between the teams in a sun-drenched derby on Sunday which saw the Blues pepper the Eagles' six-yard box with 21 shots, though only five were on target.
Crystal Palace, with new manager Leif Smerud at the helm and in their first FA Cup quarter-final, thwarted Chelsea's assaults on their goal – Yanez's net leading a charmed life.
Not clinical enough
Manager Sonia Bompastor admitted that her team needed to be more clinical in front of goal – especially with the first trophy of the season up for grabs – the League Cup final against Manchester City in Derby this Saturday.
"At least the good point is that we created a lot, so I'm not concerned, and now we just need to be clinical in those moments. But it's never easy to score goals," she said.
Chelsea seem to be finding it harder to hit the back of the net these days, even against a side which is languishing at the bottom of the Super League table.
They will need to make sure their shots count in the next run of games which sees them come up against City four times on the trot: this weekend's league cup final fixture, in the Champions League on March 19 and 27, and in the Super League on March 23.
Meanwhile, Chelsea's men (who travel to Arsenal for a tricky derby this weekend) made hard work of their 1-0 win over Leicester City at the Bridge on Sunday. It mirrored the women's game.
The matches kicked off at 2pm and 2.30pm. It took an hour for each Chelsea team to find the back of the net against opposition from their respective leagues' basements, via left-foot shots (from Marc Cucurella and Lauren James), and both teams had to settle for single-goal wins.
Happy 120th birthday
Monday 10 March marked Chelsea FC's birthday. That evening, 120 years ago, a crowded meeting in a smoke-filled room above the Rising Sun pub in Fulham Road (today it's the Butcher's Hook) raised £5,000 (around half a million in today's money) to set up the football club.
It may be American-owned today, but at its outset it was a very local club. Of the nine board members, five lived round the corner; two in Fulham Road and one each in Wardo Avenue, Radipole Road and Epirus Road.
At a later gathering of the other football league clubs, the new Chelsea FC was voted straight into Division 2 for the 1905-06 season, and kicked off its first match 80 days after that inaugural pub gathering, with the team wearing pale jade jerseys.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and unless specifically stated are not necessarily those of Hammersmith & Fulham Council.
