It’s the season of festive games in the Premier League, one of the best times all year to get Chelsea Tickets, but also one of the hardest.
With the English top flight exceptionally compressed and competitive this year, almost any game is a good one to go to. Just look at our home record this season – every game is winnable or losable, and you’re unlikely to see a boring game where we blow a team away.
A glance at the fixtures coming up over the next few weeks shows just how unpredictable the campaign has been and is going to be.
Starting with Aston Villa this weekend, it’s hard to say how any game will go. Unai Emery’s team started the season unable to score a goal but have now dropped an incredible 10 game winning streak and burst above us into third place. That game feels like a big one – win it and we can really disrupt their worrying momentum, lose it and we’re an incredible 10 points behind them.
That’s just the start – next up are Bournemouth, who aren’t having such a great season but can beat anyone on their day. We certainly wouldn’t mark that one down as an easy 3 points. Then we head to Man City, another massive game against one of the best teams in the league, and another side rounding into worrying form.
Fulham in a midweek night game after that will want revenge for our slightly jammy win earlier in the season. Then we take on Brentford, looking for revenge of our own after they bullied us at the G Tech in the reverse fixture.
Palace are no mugs, despite not being able to get as many good results as they’d like recently. They can beat anyone on their day.
We close out January with a game against West Ham who are by far the weakest team we will play – but even they are looking more solid under Nuno Espirito Santo and will be fighting for their lives.
All of that runs concurrently with games in both domestic cups and the Champions League.
All in all, the next couple of months will be fascinating to watch develop, and by the end of January it will be very interesting to see how the table has developed. This time last year we had a disastrous run, and if we can avoid dropping as many points as we did then, we can hopefully give ourselves a less pressured run to the finish line.
