Whoa, Cech is in after all;

Whoa, Petr Cech is in after all; by now, he may be wishing he’d rested up a bit. And while Czech backers must be a bit embarrassed and Blues fans a bit stressed, o boy is Shaun Maloney happy.

Not even a fan of either team, i’m still having cardiac arrest. My slacking, work-dodging gluteus maximus has been on the edge of my seat throughout Chelsea v. Aston Villa thanks to quasi-legal IPTV broadcast of the FOX Soccer Channel.

(File it under the burgeoning “You gotta love the 21st century” file: Watching English Premiership games in Hungary via American broadcast.)

Though the first Maloney goal was well hard earned, the second, well…FOX’s talking heads from the British broadcast ran through words including “awful,” “mistake,” “uncharacteristic” in all their available combinations. Cech’s “misjudging the corner at Arsenal” was exhumed and one voice mused aloud thusly: “you just wonder if … he’s trying to cover something up, if he’s trying to hide something … [this is] not what we expect from one of the great keepers in European football.”

O, and Chelsea’s “Unbeaten home record [is] hanging by a thread.”

But then Michael Ballack goes down in the box in the 48th minute, and i type hurriedly into Notepad this is one hell of a game! and then the red card to Knight and Shevchenko puts in it and suddenly it’s 2-1.

Petr. Dude. Be careful out there in the second half.