Chelsea’s new-look team still wins comfortably against Leverkusen

Andre Villa-Boas obviously was thinking ahead to Sunday’s match against the League leaders Man Utd when he rested John Terry and Frank Lampard for tonight’s opening Champions League game against Bayer Leverkusen.

Although Chelsea had a new-look side they were still comfortably favourites in the live betting, the waiting journalists couldn’t help but ask if the Portugese manager was taking a risk by leaving out his two most experienced players, but he was always confident Chelsea would win anyway.

“I don’t see things like that.” he said. “I think you are trying to look at the negative when there are so many positives.

“We have a very, very competitive squad and a tremendous calendar in front of us.

“I think this decision has to be taken bearing in mind the amount of minutes people collect internationally and the amount of talent that we have at our disposal.

“The team that we selected today was a team that gave us comfort to win the game and that’s what we did.”

“Everybody has been amazing in this effort to absorb all of these new ideas. I’ve very happy with everyone.

“Excellent work from everybody, excellent effort. Tremendous work rate, tremendous amount of possession. Good attacking fluency and a game well played. So I’m very happy and pleased with the group.”

“It’s a shame the second (goal) took a while to arrive because it would have given us a little bit more comfort,” he added.

“I think it was a game for us to win and we had a lot of chances. A fair result would be Chelsea winning it and I’m glad it came.”

As usual Chelsea have got off to a good start in the Champions League, but it remains to be seen if they can carry that confidence through to the match against the Premier League Champions at Old Trafford on Sunday. That will be AVB’s first real test of his tenure at Stamford Bridge.