How will African Cup of Nations affect Chelsea’s chances?

One competition Premiership managers especially hate is African Cup of Nations since it often leaves them without several important players in the most important part of the season. Next edition of the competition will take part from 10th to 31st January but you should also take into account that the national teams are entitled to have the players around two weeks before the tournament starts. Therefore, Carlo Ancelotti will have to do without Drogba, Kalou, Mikel and Essien for approximately five Premiership matches. Seeing that we are talking about the crucial part of the season, this could be a problem.

First of all, Chelsea look like the hot favourites for the title with both United and Liverpool underperforming, although they will have to be wary of ever impressive Arsenal. Therefore, the Blues cannot afford to drop too many points during the Christmas holidays because that would put a big pressure on the team. The good thing is that Ancelotti has big enough squad to cope with the absentees unless the squad is hit with a big injury crisis. John Obi Mikel is not going to be sorely missed since he has barely featured this season, but losing Essien would definitely weaken the defensive part of the team. However, the boss could be handed a surprise boost since the Ghanian midfielder pulled out of the national team squad last weekend without having the consent of the Ghana coach and the national team officials have announced Essien could be banned from representing Ghana in the future.

The biggest blow will be losing Drogba and his replacement Kalou, since that will leave Nicolas Anelka as the only senior striker in the squad. There is a couple of ways how the boss can solve this problem. The first one is moving Joe Cole to partner Anelka, while playing Ballack as the tip of the diamond, while Ancelotti could also opt to modify his formation a little bit. The Italian also has two great young strikers in Borini and Sturridge, who have already proved their potential and this can be the right time to hand them the chance to shine. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

The most important thing, however, is that the Blues mostly face teams from the bottom part of the table during this period, thus the absence of aforementioned players shouldn’t be such a big problem. Chelsea are set to face Fulham, Sunderland and Birmingham at home, while playing Hull City and Burnley away, and they couldn’t have wished for the better fixture list. All the players will return in time to face Arsenal on 6th February and as things now stand, the next African Cup of Nations won’t do Chelsea a lot of harm. Therefore, the right betting strategy is to back Chelsea to win the Premiership at odds of 1.91 offered by 888sport.