Chelsea vs Roma Preview!!

Our campaign to qualify from Group 'A' continues on Wednesday evening with an intriguing fixture against the Italian side AS Roma.

It promises to be one of those nights everyone hankers for in Europe, a full house and a heavy expectation that Chelsea will win and move closer to qualification.

However, our injury list suggests that the path to victory may not be as straight forward as first thought.

Although the team, minus seven stars, comfortably beat Middlesbrough, on Saturday, AS Roma will not be as poor as Middlesbrough were and will want to get their own qualification campaign back on track.

As I type up this article, out of the seven who missed the trip to Middlesbrough, it's anticipated that only Petr Cech stands a realistic chance of making a recovery, if so it'll be bad luck on Carlo Cudicini who rarely had an opportunity to show what he could do on Saturday.

Frank Lampard, a hero of our Champions League campaign last season, has spoken out about the forthcoming match and the injury problems remarking,

'We believe in everyone. We would be quite happy with the team that played Boro to play against Roma.'

'If we play with the same attitude I think we have the quality in the team. The only thing we can fail is when we do not work as hard as the other team. But when we do we get our results.'

'Over the course of the season it is all about the squad and it is up to the manager to decide the strongest team. It is testament to the squad, player like Juliano Belletti who has been fantastic, coming in to the team.'

Whilst Chelsea are in good form, AS Roma are not. They slipped to fourteenth in Serie A this weekend courtesy of a 4-0 thrashing by Jose's Inter Milan and will looking to put on a better performance.

Roma arrive in SW6 with some familiar names in their ranks. Amongst them are their club captain Francesco Totti and his vice-captain (a name familiar to some of us) Christian Panucci. Also lurking in their ranks is someone who will always live long in our memories, someone who`ll always be part of our folklore - John Arne Riise! Who`ll ever forget that stunning injury time header at Anfield last season?

Totti remains an iconic figure for the club though having notched up a record number of appearances for them as well as a record number of goals, but will his ageing body be bale to drag a decent performance out of it?

Perhaps we should instead heed the likes of Julio Cesar Baptista and Alberto Aquilani who lead the scoring charts for the club this season with three goals, a feat also matched by Christian Panucci! However, we believe Baptista is currently injured and may not play.

Here we expect Luiz Felipe Scolari to select a starting line up that will be remarkably similar to that which started at Middlesbrough.

In fact, we'd go for exactly the same with Petr Cech on the bench alongside a whole host of youngsters, youngsters that will, no doubt, be eager to play their part in a historic night.

As for the result, we'll go for a 2-0 Chelsea win.