Chelsea squad not good enough

Carlo Ancelotti has admitted that Chelsea's squad was too weak this season and the policy of trimming senior players last summer, while offering youngsters more of an incentive to excel, was exposed by a flurry of mid-season injuries to key players. The defending champions are confronting the prospect of only their third trophy-less campaign of the Roman Abramovich era while Ancelotti is expected to pay the price by leaving Stamford Bridge at the end of the season once the hierarchy have conducted their own review of the year. A sequence that led to only 10 points being taken from 11 matches before the turn of the year, a period in which Frank Lampard, John Terry, Michael Essien and Alex were absent and Didier Drogba played despite suffering from malaria, wrecked their title defence and effectively reduced them to a pursuit of second place. Ancelotti reiterated he had supported the decision to release or sell five players Michael Ballack, Joe Cole, Juliano Belletti, Deco and Ricardo Carvalho last summer, even if the lack of depth to his squad was subsequently made painfully clear. "I don't think the squad was good enough this year," he said. "The philosophy I agreed with, to replace very important players with younger players, it was a good time to do this, so I agreed with the club's philosophy. But at the start of the season we couldn't have envisaged having very important players all out at the same time. "We struggled to manage this without Lampard, Drogba, Essien, Terry, Alex. It was very difficult to move on without these kind of player, not just their technical qualities but their personality and character. We missed them in November and December when we didn't play well. I think it cost us quite a few points. Before the ‘difficult moment' we'd used our younger players, like [Gal] Kakuta and [Daniel] Sturridge. "We'd done it gradually but it was harder to put the responsibility on them when the difficult moment came. "That period went on too long. You cannot think at the start of the season that you'd have all these players out together. At a certain point in the season we needed to put [Paulo] Ferreira, a right-back, at centre-half because we'd lost all our other centre-backs." That game was surrendered 3-0 at home to Sunderland, one of three defeats in four league games that served to undermine Ancelotti's tenure. Guardian News