Villa-Boas Leads Spurs Past Chelsea Into 3rd

Villa-Boas Leads Spurs Past Chelsea Into 3rd

The Blues slipped to 4th in the Barclays Premier League without kicking a ball as a Gareth Bale double took former Chelsea manager Andre Villa-Boas’ Tottenham outfit past West Ham 3-2 at Upton Park in the Monday night game. Gareth Bale’s performance was in a different class to the other players on the field as he put Tottenham 1-0 up in the first half with a sweet strike from just inside the box. But if his 1st goal was good his second and also the winning goal was a genuine “worldie” as he smashed his shot from over 30 yards into the top left hand corner of Jussi Jaaskelainen’s goal.

Villa-Boas was in charge of Spurs for his 27th game this season and what a difference a year makes as it was after his 27th game in charge of Chelsea last year that Roman Abramovich relieved the Portuguese manager of his duties. You can’t help but be impressed with how Villa-Boas has rebounded after his short stint in charge of the Blues and I wish he had been given more of a chance with Chelsea. Surely, he deserved to be shown more patience and he is making Roman’s itchy trigger finger look more and more misguided.

We are on our 2nd manager since Andre Villa-Boas left and surely we would be in just as good a postion if he was still in charge or for that matter if Roberto Di Matteo was still in charge. It is frustrating to think we could have either of these two men as our manager now but we have Benitez who hard as he might be trying just does not seem to be able to take us where we need to be. Champions League qualification is by no means a certainty, with Spurs 1 point ahead of us we can only hope they lose on the weekend against Arsenal. We have to be wary of both North London rivals since Arsenal are only 2 points behind us in 5th so we are in a serious dogfight.

The match against Tottenham at Stamford Bridge on April 14th is starting to look more and more like it could be a deciding factor in the run-in for the top 4. Let’s hope Benitez can deliver the goods or we will be looking forward to another season in the Europa League but this time we might not even have a taste of the Champions League.