Chelsea 3 Leeds 2: Gallagher nets last-gasp winner ease pressure on Pochettino as Blues edge out brave Whites in FA Cup

9 months ago 63

MAYBE no bottle but at least there is still one cup for Chelsea.

But only just as Conor Gallagher fired them into the quarter finals with just eight seconds of normal time remaining.

Conor Gallagher came off the bench to net a late winner for Chelsea against Leeds[/caption]

A nervous Chelsea had been pegged back and put under the cosh by Championship Leeds and appeared to be heading for extra time for the second time in 72 hours.

And with their recent record of tossing everything away, it was odds on that they would end up on the wrong end of another half hour or even penalties.

But Gallagher came off the bench and rescued his team with a cracking drive right at the death and set up a sixth round tie against Leicester City.

It doesn’t completely make up for the glaring miss in Sunday’s Carabao Cup final defeat but will go some way to easing the long-serving midfielder’s tortured mind following his Wembley error.

It could mean so much more to his beleaguered manager Mauricio Pochettino, who needed a win by any means to get over the heartache of last weekend and to save his job.

Gallagher’s goal could well go down in history as Poch’s ‘Mark Robins’ moment. A fabled account of how Sir Alex Ferguson was facing the bullet at Manchester United only for Robins to keep him in post with the winner in an FA Cup tie in 1990.

Pochettino certainly owes his undervalued one-time academy kid one whether or not he would have been sacked had he lost.

Chelsea were in the driving seat then made it much harder for themselves when it should have been game over.

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Pochettino’s team were labelled ‘£1 billion bottle jobs’ by pundit Gary Neville in the wake of their Carabao Cup Final defeat to Liverpool at the weekend. And he had a point.

While they showed great character to fight back from a goal down against a team which has not lost since December, there is a fragility in this team.

From the unforced error in the eighth minute when a cock up between Axel Disasi and Moises Caicedo allowed Mateo Joseph to pick their pockets and score the first of his two on the night – with broadcasters ITV missing the goal as they were showing a replay at the time.

With heavy legs and sagging morale what Chelsea needed most was an easy passage into the game. Which is precisely what they didn’t get.

Trying to play the ball out of their box, Disasis and Caicedo got in a muddle and ended up conceding a ridiculous goal that only heightened the tension inside Stamford Bridge.

They had only just survived a scare moments earlier when Leeds winger Dan James mugged Alfie Gilchrist, playing as the most right-footed left back in English football, to hook a shot dangerously close.

Mateo Joseph fired Leeds ahead after just eight minutes[/caption]

Nicolas Jackson made it 1-1 moments later[/caption]

The sense of dread and imminent implosion seeped into Chelsea stomachs and it was nervy stuff until Jackson’s timely intervention seven minutes later.

Caicedo made up for his earlier blunder by feeding a ball through to the striker who rode a challenge and rolled a shot across the face of goal for the equaliser.

Finding the net relaxed the mood and it was pretty much all going Chelsea’s way when Mudryk capped a cracking first half performance with his first ever FA Cup goal.

Raheem Sterling and Malo Gusto combined on the right flank, with the former then cutting the ball back inside the box for Mudryk to divert a shot into the opposite corner.

Mykhailo Mudryk put Chelsea ahead before the break[/caption]

Joseph netted his second of the game with half an hour left[/caption]

It should have been plain sailing then against a good team but one with promotion back to the Premiership upper most in their minds.

Why Pochettino chose to position Gilchrist on the opposite side of the pitch to where he normally plays must have been to rest Ben Chilwell’s legs as his first choice left back recovers from long term hamstring issues.

From way out on the Leeds’ left, Anthony delivered a deep cross to where Gilchrist should have been, to find Joseph who was left in clear space to head in, score his second, make it 2-2 and set the game up for a fractious last half an hour.

Pochettino turned to his bench and brought on Cole Palmer and Conor Gallagher to try to get momentum going forwards with pace and experience.

It worked – sort of – when Gallagher was positioned perfectly inside the box to bury a shot just as the board went up displaying four minutes of injury time.

They rode out the final few minutes and Pochettino and Chelsea breathed a huge sigh of relief when the final whistle blew.