Jermaine Beckford, former Chelsea junior, started the game upfront for Everton, with Osman on in place of Bilyaletdinov as part of the supply system behind him. Jagielka replaced Heitinga. Baines looked to have an early chance down the left but overplayed his ball in to Beckford. Everton had good possession and probed away for the first few minutes until Coleman lost the ball in the middle. Chelsea got more ball though and Osman helped them out, losing possession easily.
This led to a spell of Chelsea pressure that was repelled and set up another move down the Everton left but that failed to penetrate the Chelsea area. Coleman did well to beat Cole to a good forward ball from Cahill but his cross was poor. Drogba went down awkwardly on a challenge from Osman and looked to leave the game.
Baines again got a good ball in down the left but Coleman's header for the far post back to his attackers was again poor and a good attacking position was squandered. But Everton were at least .having a go, limited mostly by their own abailities rather than any great defending by Chelsea.
Coleman fouled Cole and from the free kick, Jagielka put Howard under tremendous pressure, his header hitting the post and Terry, surprised by the rebound, could only fire high over the bar. Baines again did brilliantly and served a superb ball in for Beckford but the striker did absolutely nothing with it!
Another good move say Baines cross early to Osman and his ball to Coleman resulted in a shot and Everton's first corner, delivered too high. From that Chelsea attacked in earnest, Malouda forcing a desperate save from Malouda and Drogba's follow up wizzzed wide.
Everton looked to break and Beckford got the ball in a great position but failed to shot and then got the ball stuck at his feet and had to pass to Coleman who wasted it. Cheslea attacked and Drogba played in Malouda who had was denied by Howard. Osman did well to block the header from Ivanovic off the corner.
The game was getting more lively on the half-hour, both sides pressing, and Everton making a decent fist of it but, as ever, not carrying that forward into the goal area. Drodba was finally looking more interested, and fired one over from distance. Howard punched the resulting corner away well.
Fellaini delivered a couple of good balls from the left, the first for Beckford but his shot was blocked, the second defended away. Maoluda crunched into Coleman and was the first recipient of a yellow card just before the break. They then got a good free kick wide right that was delivered well by Arteta but defended away.
Ramires looked to have perhaps won a penalty as he pushed the ball past Howard who had rushed out at him but was rather surprisingly booked for simulation! 0-0 at the break.
Neville got called for a foul and Drogba fired in a tricky one that Howard somehow denied Kalou. At the other end, Ossman tried to lob Cech but he execution was weak. Baines got a yellow for allowing Ramieres to run into him. Some dreadful ball-watchong allowed Chelsea to get a chance and Osman was again the key man to block Maoluda's shot off the corner.
Coleman then got booked for his foul on Ivanovic. This led to some dangerous Chelsea possession, with Drogba winning a free-kick off Baines but Lampard's free header was thankfully well off target. Beckford got pushed and Baines swung in a good delivery that Osman glanced his header into Cech's hands. Lampard then gave Arteta a gift but his ball in to Beckford was just behind him and his shot flew over.
Distin then went in Phil Dowd's book for a lunging tackle and the free-kick led to some anxious moments for Everton ending in a lashed corner that flew over everyone. The quality of play in the final third was pretty poor from both sides, neither able to produce a real chance for a goal. Coleman looked to run at Chelsea but Beckford patheticly yanked on Ferara's arm, and Dowd blew for the foul as Coleman ran into a roadblock.
At the other end, Kalou and Ramieres set up Lampard for the chance f teh game but Hovward blocked the certain goal. From the corner, Ivanovic looked to fire home but Howard again came up big with the block. .Ramieres then ran at the Everton defence and fired a daisy cutter just wide. 20 mins to go and the lack of goals suggested extra time or worse would be needed to settle this one.
Tim Cahill, who had not had a great game, was replaced by Bilyaletdinov. Chelsea had another spell of pressure, Lampard unable to threaten the goal with his shot. Everton then returned the honour, Coleman finally heading into Cech's hands.
Chelsea threatened again, Lampard firing wide. Jagielka got an elbow in the face from Drogba, and a facial cut. Beckford, who had been pretty poor, was replaced by Anichebe with 10 mins left. Bily then whipped in a great ball that should have been converted by Anichebe at the near post, and in the follow-up, Bily should have done a lot better.
Chelsea looked to score with a Lampard lob but it floated over the bar with the Everton defence in disarray, and they were looking the more dangerous as the final minutes ticked away. Chelsea truned the screw and it was Everton whoo had to batten down the hatches, Anichebe got a chance to run and alleviate some pressure, going down easily and winning a soft free kick.
In the follow-up, Everton appeared to have pulled off a fantastic win at the death when Baines fired in a shot that Cech could only parry and Fellaini was there to fire it home... but he was ruled to have been offside when Baines shot. 3 mins of added. Anichebe won a corner that Drogba headed away and the game went into Extra Time.
With little happening after the restart, Moyes made an odd switch, taking Osman off and replacing him with Heitinga. Drogba tried to chip Howard but overhit it. Everton worked a chance for Heitinga to shoot but it was blocked. Jagielka did well to shepherd Drogba away from goal at the expense of a corner. Everton produced another labored attack that broke down and Chelsea broke, winning a corner from which Lampard fired wide.
A poor bit of defending saw Distin and Baines allowing Anelka to cross for Lampard who needed a second attempt to fire the ball in past Howard for what must surely be the winner just before the break in Extra Time.
Moyes's Boys looked bereft of ideas in the second 15 mins, Heitinga making a horribly loose pass and Neville delivering apoor cross, Baines hoofing it to a foulling/offside Fellaini, Arteta squandering a wasteful forward pass then comitting a silly foul out of frustration and earning a yellow card, Distin hoofing from the back into enmpty space, when they did get possession. The moribund tactic was clearly Route One: hoof it up to the makeshift forwards, Fellaini and Jagielka, with Anichebe all but invisible. Chelsea did their best to sit on their hard-eearned lead and play out the clock.
As the minutes ticked away, it looked like Everton would go out with a wimper after a stout but ultimately weak performance in front of goal. But, with barely a minute remaining in Extra Time, Ivanovic gave away a free kick by fouling Jagielka as he went for one of those big hoofs from the back. It was an excellent position for a late and dramatic free-kick, front and centre... and literally in the last minute of Extra Time, Leighton Baines stroked it exquisitly just inside the post in front of the 6,000 Evertonians to rescue the tie and put Everton right back in it, with penalties now looming. Essien had a shot that Howard fumbled a little just before the whistle and penalties it was...
A great result from a poor game were neither side really impressed. But winning is all that matters in the FA Cup. One footnote was the deliberaet collison Johnny Heitinga engineered with Ashley Cole as the Everton player walked back to the centre-cicle after scoring his spot kick. Cole was bemoused and puzzled but it seemed to do the trick, as the Chelsea player blazzed their vital last spot-kick well wide of the goal!
Everton surely now have a golden chance to proceed with a home tie against Reading a week on Tuesday in the Fifth Round.
Michael Kenrick
A week can be a long time in football. On Sunday evening, genuine fear for the immediate future of Everton Football Club was starting to grip the hearts of Evertonians in the wake of that truly awful defeat at Bolton Wanderers. The paucity of the striking resources, the lack of a consistent threat from left midfield, the propensity for lapses at the back... these have become all too familiar traits of David Moyes's team in recent weeks, but the apparent death of the players' spirit was a new and alarming development.
Fast forward six days and the sight of Captain Phil Neville standing proud, arms outstretched, milking the celebrations in front of 6,000 indefatigable believers at Stamford Bridge before being mobbed by his ecstatic teammates and the passion, the spirit and the sense of unity was there again for all to see. Magical moments such as these — a stunning extra time equaliser from the sweetest left foot seen in Everton colors since the days of Kevin Sheedy and the unparalleled drama of a penalty shootout — are what the cup is all about and the Blues' long-suffering fans are hoping that this could be the Moyes era's Kevin Brock backpass.
Of course, this manager has very different terrain to navigate than the one that faced Howard Kendall almost three decades ago and while his best striker remains on the sidelines with another niggling muscle strain, he will need every drop of determination and will to win from his players. For the bulk of this FA Cup Fourth Round replay, Everton looked desperately short of attacking threat, Jermaine Beckford proving once more that he is il-suited to the lone striker role and his eventual replacement, Victor Anichebe, betraying a general lack of quality needed at this level of the game.
For much of the second half, the tie looked Chelsea's to win if they could find a way past the stubborn resistance of Everton's back line and a goalkeeper enjoying one of those career-defining days. The visitors, despite the backing of a huge and vocal traveling contingent, had waned as an attacking threat, especially after a bruised Tim Cahill was withdrawn after 70 minutes, completing first Beckford and then Anichebe's isolation up front.
And yet with a bit of luck — or better judgement from the referee's assistant? — the Blues might have stolen this replay in the 90th minute when Marouane Fellaini rammed home the loose ball after Peter Cech had spilled a right-foot shot by Everton's standout outfield performer, Leighton Baines, but he was adjudged to have been offside. Television replays would show the upper half of his body was beyond the last man, his lower half level but with the offside rule being so enigmatic these days, it was hard to know whether or not it was the right decision. Had it been allowed to stand, it would have proved to be an unlikely winner given that, on balance, Chelsea had done enough to merit a place in the next round.
Everton had started brightly enough and played a more settled passing game than their hosts in the opening exchanges but it was Carlo Ancelotti's side who came within the width of the post to opening the scoring when Phil Jagielka glanced a deep free kick off the foot of his own post in the 20th minute.
Signs that Howard was on top form arrived a few minutes later when the American saved well with his legs from Florent Malouda, Didier Drogba rapping the rebound wide of goal, and then standing up impressively to deny Malouda after Drogba had slipped the Frenchman in with a well-weighted pass.
The game's first moment of controversy, however, arrived on the stroke of half time as Ramires raced into the right side of the Everton area, Howard charged out at him and committed himself with slide towards his feet and the Brazilian tumbled to the ground. Chelsea players and fans alike bayed for a penalty but after a pause for thought and a look at his assistant, Phil Dowd brandished a yellow card for Ramires instead for simulation. From one angle it looked to be a stonewall penalty but closer analysis shows that if Howard made any conttact it was minimal and that, deliberately or otherwise, Ramires catches his toe in the turf.
Everton's only threat in the first half had been from a number of promising balls into the box, mainly from Baines on the left but occasionally by Coleman, the quality of whose delivery is still some way short of matching his endeavour down the right flank, but with few vanilla shirts forward, the crosses rarely found an Everton player.
Beckford spent most of his time chasing shadows but did link nicely with the hard-working but ultimately ineffective Leon Osman three minutes into the second half, the midfielder steering a right-footed half-volley wide of Peter Cech's goal from just outside the area. Then, after Frank Lampard had headed disappointingly wide from his team's point of view at the other end, Osman saw a tame header caught by the 'keeper and Beckford skied a first-time effort off Mikel Arteta's low cross, though the ball from the Spaniard was probably too far behind him to enable him to get off the kind of shot he's have liked.
With the game an hour old and referee Dowd seemingly finished with his programme of "evening up" for the penalty decision by waving the yellow card at any vanilla jersey that moved — Coleman, Baines and Distin were all booked in the first 15 minutes of the second period but only the French defender's rash sliding tackle deserved it — Chelsea began to turn the screw and Everton's FA Cup lives started to really look in peril.
In the 64th minute they were opened up by Salomon Kalou on the right side of the area and he slipped the ball inside to Ramires who crossed low to Lampard to side-foot goalwards from about eight yards out. Howard, though, turned the shot around the post with his standing foot for a corner. When Malouda's resulting kick fell to Branislav Ivanovic at the back post, the Serbian defender looked to prod it home but Howard was there again to block it on the line.
But for all their territorial domination, the Londoners created few other genuine chances in normal time, Lampard chipping the best of them over the bar after Malouda had played him in, while a Coleman header from Bilyaletdinov's superb chipped cross to the back post that Cech saved low and, of course, Fellaini's disallowed goal reminded Chelsea that the Blues weren't going to lie down and die.
The back of Everton's defiant stand looked to have been broken in extra time, though. when Nicolas Anelka wriggled between Baines and Distin on the Chelsea right, his cross eluded Jagielka and Heitinga and Lampard fired into the far corner to make it 1-0.
But Baines had other ideas. When Ivanovic was penalised for a foul a few yards outside the area with a little over a minute left on the clock, the England international defender set his sights and then curled an absolute beauty of a free kick into the top corner, well beyond the reach of Cech who could just watch as the ball floated inside his left-hand post. The massed ranks of Everton fans behind the goal erupted as one and Everton were back in the tie, having forced a penalty shootout.
That the sudden-death drama would play out at the same end of the ground made what would follow all the sweeter. Lampard despatched his penalty past Howard with aplomb but when Baines made it all too easy for Cech to push the Blues' first kick away it looked as though the left back had gone from hero to villain.
There were more twists to come, though. Anelka tried to be clever with one-step run-up but Howard guessed the right way and beat his kick away with his right palm allowing Arteta to level the scores with an emphatic shot into the corner. Heitinga and Essien successfully converted their penalties but, after some cheeky gamesmanship by the Dutchman where he pumped up the traveling fans before bumping Ashley Cole with his shoulder as he walked past, Cole swept his kick high and wide of the angle of post and bar handing the place in the fifth round on Everton's plate.
And so the responsibility of the all-important fifth spot kick was left to the unlikely figure of Neville who set himself up two paces from the ball and then rattled it into the roof of the net with the technique and composure of a world-class striker before advancing to celebrate in front of the faithful.
A first Everton win, albeit by "technical knockout", at Stamford Bridge since 1994 secured against the odds is the latest in a line of potential catalysts to the kickstart a revival in the team's fortunes this season and it is obviously the fervent hope of all Blues fans that this result does galvanise the players for the Premier League run-in and, of course, the rest of the road to Wembley, one that could yet take them through Eastlands if they overcome Reading on 1st March and Manchester City beat Aston Villa.
They will continue to be handicapped in Saha's absence, though, as the striker position remains a very worrying problem with him out the side. Beckford clearly needs the support of another striker playing alongside him — Cahill was playing a deeper role on this occasion — and Anichebe just doesn't appear to have the quality, the movement or the ability to hold the ball up as a lone striker either.
This result brought back many memories of the semi-final triumph over Manchester United two years ago, one in which a toothless Everton side repelled the advances of supposedly superior opposition before winning a dramatic penalty shoot-out to dump a so-called "Big Four" team out of the competition. When the chips are down like that and you don't necessarily have the tools to go to-to-toe with a better equipped team, spirit can be the determining factor and that will count for plenty between now and the end of the season.
In the meantime, Moyes's players have delivered we fans another moment of magic to savour and who can't resist watching clips of that thrilling climax over and over again to pass the time between now and next weekend's kick-off against Sunderland?
Lyndon Lloyd
The strength of Everton's character and the extent of their fragility in the wake of Sunday's awful performance against Bolton Wanderers will come under harsh examination at Stamford Bridge this weekend in the replay of this FA Cup Fourth Round tie.
The Blues arguably gifted Chelsea a lifeline in the competition by letting them back into the original match at Goodison Park three weeks ago when, having made the crucial breakthrough with a Louis Saha header, they succumbed to a quick counter-attack and Salomon Kalou scored the equaliser to bring the tie back to London.
Since then, David Moyes's side revealed their spirit and determination with a battling 5-3 win over Blackpool at Goodison Park but those qualities disappeared at the Reebok Stadium eight days later in a 2-0 defeat that ignited in the hearts of Evertonians the kind of fear and dread of a relegation scrap that they thought had been consigned to history for the foreseeable future.
A trip tp Chelsea, a do-or-die cup replay with Reading awaiting the winner, offers the opportunity for immediate, if temporary, redemption but Moyes will will likely have to attempt to pull off his first victory at Stamford Bridge since taking charge of the Bues almost nine years ago without two players who played huge parts in that thrilling victory over Blackpool.
According to the Echo, Louis Saha has been back in training this week, despite his initial diagnosis suggesting the earliest he might be back would be the end of the month, and if that's the case then he would undergo a late fitness test to see if he could make a shock return from a hamstring strain suffered in training last week.
The Frenchman has made scoring against Chelsea a fun habit in his time with Everton and has, in the last year, scored three of the Blues's four goals against the West Londoners. The other was scored by Jermaine Beckford and given Victor Anichebe's petulant and ineffective display at Bolton, it would be criminal if the ex-Leeds man wasn't given the opportunity to repeat his scoring heroics against Carlo Ancelotti's side.
The other missing player will be Jack Rodwell whose enterprise against Blackpool helped create two of Saha's goals that day and might have yielded another were it not for some incredible defending by Ian Evatt. The 19 year-old picked up a groin strain playing for England U-21s 10 days ago and is ruled out until March.
Assuming Saha doesn't make it — and the 32 year-old hasn't shown much of a propensity to bounce back quickly from his various muscle strains — that leaves Moyes with the same options as he had going into last weekend's match, though with plenty to think about given the shocking nature of the team's performance.
In addition to Anichebe, John Heitinga might be at risk, paving the way for Phil Jagielka to return to the first team for Phil Jagielka and Diniyar Bilyaletdinov could find himself making may for Leon Osman, even though he fared little better than the Russian on Sunday after coming on as a second-half substitute. Magaye Gueye, a name that becomes harder and harder to ignore the more those ahead of in the queue for the left midfield role continue to under-perform and the more curiosity about his ability to be be the replacement for Steven Pienaar builds among supporters, remains an onlooker in the meanwhile.
Chelsea will be without their of their latest high-profile signings in the form of Fernando Torres and David Luiz, both of whom are ineligible but Didier Drogba, John Mikel Obi and Kalou are all in contention having sat out the goalless draw with Fulham on Monday.
With Ancelotti wanting more out of a team that is clearly struggling for consistency, there is plenty of scope for Everton to spring a surprise and escape into the fifth round with the FA Cup holders' scalp in hand but it's going to take a shift in attitude and performance from last weekend of monumental proportions if they're to achieve it.
They'll be roared on by 6,000 laudible supporters, though — the traveling Blues bought up the full away allocation — and it'll be up to the players to reward that loyalty with a valiant effort to finally gain revenge for that Wembley disappointment two years ago.
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