Chelsea has-beens, might-bes and never-will-bes steer Strasbourg to fine win over Crystal Palace
It’s vaguely unsettling watching Strasbourg play football. There’s something of the uncanny valley of this football club that isn’t really a football club any more deploying players that aren’t really its own and with the ultimate goal of the club being the betterment of Chelsea.
They’re not the first or last club to find themselves in this position, but they are one of the best. They are a tremendous amount of fun if you can just swallow down all the nagging thoughts that what you’re watching is in some way hastening the demise of the very concept of sport.
What Strasbourg do have among their collection of Chelsea might-bes, has-beens, never-will-bes and possiblys is an enormous amount of talent.
There is, perhaps inevitably given the real aim of the whole enterprise, an occasional lack of cohesion but when it comes together as it did in frequent beguiling 10-minute clumps during a thoroughly entertaining yet oft baffling 2-1 Europa Conference win over Crystal Palace they are a joy to watch.
The definitively Chelsea-bound Emanuel Emegha is particularly eye-catching, at 22 already a senior player and club captain in what is – again, by inevitable design – a ridiculously young team. When it all threatened to get away from them in the first half, they called on another Chelsea – and also Palace – connection in Ben Chilwell to perform a kind of childminding role and get them back on task.
That worked tremendously well in the second half as Strasbourg turned on its head a game that appeared to be running away from them towards the end of the first.
Palace opened the scoring with a fine goal from Tyrick Mitchell after wonderful hold-up play and a clever pass from Jean-Phillippe Mateta. It was Palace’s first real chance, and the goal rattled Strasbourg.
The second-half fightback sees them sitting pretty in second place with 10 points from their four games. Palace, on the other hand, now need to be slightly careful having slipped towards the 24-team cutline after a second defeat of the group stage. If nothing else, this is a defeat that significantly raises the prospect of Palace having to negotiate the play-off round before the last 16, something that any Premier League team could always do without.
Palace will also wonder quite how they lost this game, and how they lost the run of it having seemed to take control by half-time
Top of their list of annoyances will be not one but two failures to take advantage of an open goal offered to them by Strasbourg’s lunatic keeper Mike Penders. We’d heard whispers of his eccentricity, and we were not disappointed.
He favours a general starting position about 25 yards from his goal and doesn’t appear to let trivialities like almost conceding a humiliating goal faze him one bit. You do find yourself rooting for him, and we desperately hope he has 15 years as Chelsea’s No. 1 in which he never, ever lets convention or humiliation change him.
Quite how he got away with it here we will never quite know. In the first half Ismaila Sarr contrived to hit the post from dead centre and 30 yards out with Penders on walkabout. In the second half, with the score at 1-1, Adam Wharton thumped the crossbar from closer range with the goal again entirely unguarded.
What Penders can also do is produce exceptional saves, as he did to deny Yeremy Pino from close range just before Samil El Mourabet tucked home the rebound after Julio Enciso’s free-kick had hit the bar.
A deeply frustrating night for Palace which leaves them with serious work to do, and a troubling one in other ways. But thanks in no small part to their large Chelsea contingent, Strasbourg also ensured it was an undeniably entertaining one.
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