JustChelsea.com

Chelsea have only managed to rustle up four homegrown players (over 21) in their squad, which means they have lost four senior places in the declared team.

John Terry, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and Ross Turnbull are the only ‘home-grown’ English players, available, but the Blues can have an unlimited number of Under 21s coming through from the youth teams.

The coach of the Ghana national team has explained the reasons why he agreed to leave Michael Essien out of the team for next weeks matches, and says that it was an amicable arrangement.

“As you know with Michael he has had two very serious injuries both with the national team in the last two years. It affected him a lot,” he said.

The youngster Jeffrey Bruma has made it into the Blues first team squad, and also been given a new contract to keep him at the club for the next four years, despite just recovering from a hernia operation.

“I am very happy to stay here,” he said. “The recovery is going well and I have no pain where I had it before.”

The Chelsea star midfielder Frank Lampard is really happy that the team has started well, and thinks that it is good that there hasn’t been many changes over the summer months.

“Continuity is nice, especially when you have won a double but you do want to add to it and make it better although at the same time you don’t want to add to it and make it worse,” Lampard said.

The Stoke goalkeeper Asmir Begovich is desperate to take advantage of Chelsea’s offer to be Peter Cech’s deputy, and says that he is very annoyed with the treatment he has received from Stoke since his arrival.

Bogovic’s agent, Will Sherling, said yesterday: “Asmir feels betrayed and let down by the club. He didn’t refuse to play against Shrewsbury and anyone who knows him knows he would never do that.

Florent Malouda scored in his third game in a row for Chelsea in this weekends win over Stoke City, and his boss Carlo Ancelotti thinks that the Frenchman has come back from the World Cup with a point to prove.

Ancelotti said: “He has started well and he is one of our best players right now. I think that he has a good motivation after the World Cup. He was angry. He wanted to improve on his poor performance in the World Cup and I think he is doing very well.

Barcelona won La Liga comfortably as usual last season and it was the usual suspects of Lionel Messi and Andeas Iniesta that did the damage, although new boy David Villa got the third one on his official debut for his new club. Santander didn’t have a chance and they will be glad to have got this game out of the way so they can now concentrate on getting their season going properly next week.

Roy Hodgson has had a difficult start to his Liverpool career with just one point from games against Arsenal and Man City. He was expected to make amends against newly-promoted West Bromwich Albion and with Fernando Torres back in the team it should have been easy for the Reds.

Robert Di Matteo was quite pleased with his team, despite losing to a Torres blaster. “Big disappointment. I thought we put in a very good performance today and kept them very quiet.” he said.

Real Madrids opening League game was always going to be difficult as the islanders of Mallorca are very hard to beat on their home turf, and so it proved. Jose Mourinho was not happy after the game, but pleaded for time to build a team to beat Barcelona.

“No one can say we did not create chances,” Mourinho said. “We spent the whole time in their half and created three or four good opportunities.”

Man City have soent well over £100m this summer (again!), but they are finding that they need more than money to guarantee a top four place in the new competitive Premiership.

Shiek Mansour saw his new playthings make mincemeat of Liverpool in midweek, but the found out the reality of life at the top with defeat at Sunderland. This leaves them five points behind Chelsea after just three games.