Ba To The Rescue As Chelsea Keep Tittle Hopes Alive

The forgotten man of Chelsea is doing a decent job of reminding José Mourinho that he might have something to offer after all.For the second time in the space of six days, Demba Ba came to Chelsea’s rescue, following up his decisive late strike against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League in midweek with the only goal of the game at Swansea to keep alive their hopes of winning the title.

Mourinho may have conceded defeat on that front after losing at Crystal Palace last month but Chelsea are still in the race. This narrow but deserved victory lifts them to within two points of Liverpool and they still have to go to Anfield.

Either side of that fixture Chelsea take on Atlético Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals. They would still need Manchester City to slip up to triumph in the Premier League but it is shaping up to be quite a climax to the season.

Few would have imagined that Ba would end up playing an important role. It has been quite a week for the man who has spent much of the season confined to the substitutes’ bench, listening to Mourinho’s put downs about his lack of “real strikers”. There is nothing particularly refined about Ba, and there remains every chance he will move on in the summer, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that he has scored two hugely significant goals in his last two appearances.

Granted only his third league start of the season,  Ba capitalised on a catalogue of Swansea mistakes to score midway through the second half, just when the visitors were starting to become anxious about whether the breakthrough would come.

By that point Swansea had long been playing with 10 men, after Chico Flores was dismissed in the 16th minute, when he picked up two yellow cards in the space of 123sec. Already on a booking for a poor challenge on Willian, Flores was playing with fire when he cynically brought down André Schürrle as the German broke away on the Chelsea left. It was a ridiculous challenge for the Spaniard to make.

The incident proved controversial because of how Phil Dowd, the referee, handled the situation. While there was no doubt that Flores deserved to be sent off, Dowd initially awarded a free-kick and gave no indication initially that he was going to show a second yellow card.

Mourinho, waving two fingers in the air to signify that it was Flores’s second offence, was furious on the touchline and raged at Robert Madley, the fourth official.

Belatedly Dowd arrived at that decision himself and showed a red card to Flores, prompting Garry Monk to lose his cool with Madley. The Swansea head coach was, however, much more restrained afterwards, when he described the circumstances leading up to the decision as “strange” but accepted that Dowd had ultimately got it right.