[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Jeff Astle scores at the Shed End, Stamford Bridge, 1st March 1969

Everything seems to be going suspiciously smoothly on Planet Albion at the moment, which is usually the cue for the universe to drop some serious bother on our heads. It's certainly going to be doing its best over the next fortnight or so, as the schedule gives us four fixtures in fairly quick succession: three of them against the big boys and the other against struggling Swansea, who are probably due a run of form. So, plenty of Christmas cheer in the offing there.

To begin with, we visit Stamford Bridge at midday on Sunday, and we can all have a pretty good guess at what The Plan will be. The question, as always against the elite sides, is whether it will work for us or whether it'll all come apart after twenty minutes and leave us to spend the remainder of the match complaining about it. The real ray of hope is that we've got some in-form players up our sleeve in the likes of Phillips, and hopefully Nacer Chadli may be able and willing to make an impact again. At the moment Chelsea are looking like champions-elect, and seem capable of winning at a canter, but all it takes to bring them to a halt is one spanner in the works.

Here's hoping that this Sunday, we can prove ourselves a real bunch of spanners.