A sad loss but lets not get all hyped up since we were bound to lose a game and we're gonna qualify for the next round anyways.
Eidur Gujonsson set up some good passes but I can't beleive he missed that one chance over the bar. I don't know why he was taken off though, but damn Betis for going into a defence shell. I don't understand why Terry was playing almost as a striker in the end portion of the game, that's usually Huth's job eh?
And Gallas really should be taken off that left side, speaking of which-
Gallas happy to keep a low profile despite towering record
Kevin McCarra
Tuesday October 25, 2005
The Guardian
William Gallas would make the perfect spy. He is on the scene of every crucial event for Chelsea, yet no one remembers he was there. This season he has done an impeccable job of tailing the two leaders of the team, John Terry and Frank Lampard. Gallas has followed them on to the team sheet for all 13 of the club's games.
They are the only players at Stamford Bridge to have started every match. Gallas has the distinction, too, of being treated delicately by Jose Mourinho, even when he has flirted with rebellion.
Chelsea's manager purported to believe the Frenchman's views had been fabricated after it was reported he intended to leave next summer. Gallas is a delicate case. While Mourinho is wrong if he really supposes the defender never talks to the press, his personality is inaccessible. When Gallas was young, people feared that nobody with such a submerged character could come to the fore in a sport made for ruthless attention-seekers.
Luckily, his talent spoke up for him. When Gallas left Caen, French clubs were allowed just 24 professionals in their squads and he initially joined Marseille as an amateur. Following a brief study of the newcomer, though, the coach, Roland Courbis, ditched one of his players to clear a space for Gallas.
The unobtrusiveness has still been a hindrance to his public reputation, if not his career. The president of Marseille, Pape Diouf, who was once Gallas's agent, ranks him close to the great French figures of the era, men such as Patrick Vieira and Zinedine Zidane, yet shakes his head that, by comparison, "nobody knows him".
He has at least been identified by ambitious clubs, and in the summer of 2001, Claudio Ranieri spent £6.2m to bring him to Chelsea when he was still more than a year away from making his debut for France. The self-effacing style has, all the same, done Gallas a certain amount of harm.
He is thought to be earning £35,000 a week, and while that is a handsome sum, it counts as minimum wage when Terry and Lampard are receiving about three times as much. This difficulty can be addressed, and Mourinho, playfully ready to bet his own salary on it, predicts Gallas will stay. A substantial raise is likely.
That will still not make Gallas entirely content. In fact, he is already destined for dissatisfaction, and cash alone will never dispel a deep-seated frustration. Gallas communicates freely when he is exasperated and his countrymen found him at his most eloquent after the second leg of Chelsea's Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich in April.
The side had won the tie but he burned with angst at once more being press-ganged into the left-back role. In his vexation, he claimed he would not play there again once the season was completed, though he has deputised for Asier del Horno in the current campaign. It is not a matter of mere vanity.
Indeed, this introspective man is maddened by his own flaws, knowing he is unable to overlap properly on either flank. While confident full-backs strike their crosses with pace or curl, his are generally delivered with fatalism. Gallas worries, too, about the effect on forwards who know they are not about to be provided with a chance.
Managers go on fielding him there. Raymond Domenech has been both mentor and tormentor to Gallas. The France coach selected him at right-back for the Under-21s and, worse still, now has him stranded on his wrong foot, employing him on the left.
Gallas has enough pride to feel he should have been renowned as a centre-half, and that is no delusion. In 2005, only one goal has been conceded in the 15 games he and Terry have been partnered in the middle, a wonderful lob-volley from Ryan Giggs for Manchester United in the League Cup semi-final.
In addition to his anticipation, concentration, speed and lithe strength, Gallas is so precise a tackler, suspensions are almost inconceivable.
It is only his own body he cannot overcome. He is the lightest and, at 5ft 11in, the smallest of Mourinho's four centre-halves. He can, therefore, never be guaranteed the job, not when the likes of the bruising James Beattie and Duncan Ferguson might be the opposition's attackers, as at Goodison on Sunday. In such circum-stances, Gallas will only be a full-back for club and country.
Mourinho knows, of course, that even celebrity-packed Chelsea cannot flourish without the sort of low-key excellence the defender offers. The only person who will never be delighted by that contribution is Gallas himself.
I keed I keed!