Chelsea are heavy favourites to beat West Ham tomorrow at the London Stadium. The bookies have the Blues at 1.5 to win, meaning that a bet of £10 would return £15, including the stake.
The fact that they are so heavily favoured despite playing away just goes to show what a fantastic run Antonio Conte and his team are putting together. It’s gone a little under the radar, as the shine was taken off the results by a heavy defeat in Rome in the Champions League, but apart from that game things are looking very bright for Chelsea.
Since losing in consecutive games to Manchester City and Crystal Palace, the Blues have only been beaten by Roma, winning 8 and drawing 3 of the other 11. It’s the kind of form that won them the title last year, and the kind that looked far off after a disappointing showing against Arsenal in the Community shield was followed by an opening day loss to Burnley in the Premier League.
They are finally building up a head of steam that they will hope can carry them through an extremely busy Christmas period, where they have a flurry of games in quick succession, against beatable opponents.
They face West Ham, Huddersfield, Southampton then Bournemouth, before a struggling Everton side, Brighton then Stoke.
This run takes them through to New Year’s Day against Arsenal, and while the sheer quantity of these games over the next month makes predicting results impossible, Conte will be delighted to have such easy looking games to look forward to as he rotates his team to try and keep them as fresh as possible for the second half of the season.
Meanwhile Manchester City face their city rivals United this weekend, then Tottenham next week. So far they’ve shown little sign of being slowed down by even the tougher opponents in their fixtures so far, but the recent decline of their winning margins from 4 or 5 goals to 1 or 2 is giving a little hope that the unstoppable force may be running out of momentum a little as we run into a tough part of the calendar for teams trying to play high tempo passing football.
Chelsea fans are hoping that this is a turning point in the season. City dropping even a couple of points in their upcoming tough fixtures would suddenly add a bit of spice to the title race, and give the chasing pack some real encouragement to step up their game in pursuit of the Champions elect.
