A Bridge too far for Whites

They have had the odd triumph: Wembley has been kind at times and the Youri Djorkaeff-inspired victory at Charlton - their only ever Premiership win in The Smoke - was crucial to last season's survival. But travel-weary regulars who painfully remember racking up 30 visits under six different managers without picking up a single victory (1978-86) will admit they now set off more in hope than expectation.

Yet April 12, 2003 could well turn out to be the day Bolton Wanderers banked one of their biggest ever capital gains.

Not of their own doing, unfortunately. After three successive Premiership wins, Chelsea proved a bridge too far for the Reebok raiders.

This was not, it has to be said, an altogether unexpected defeat - not by any means - but across the city at Upton Park, West Ham's draw with Aston Villa gave Sam Allardyce a vital psychological edge in the battle to beat the drop.

Haunted Hammers boss Glenn Roeder is now preparing for Saturday's long-awaited survival showdown at the Reebok in the knowledge that his hit and miss strikers wasted a glorious opportunity to haul themselves to within a point of Wanderers. Having squandered a handful of chances and being foiled by Villa's Finland keeper Peter Enckelman, they know that, barring a thumping victory, they will still be in the bottom three with just four games to play!

Small wonder then that Allardyce and his players were relatively matter-of-fact in their appraisal of their own performance as they left West London.

They had not even come close to ending their 43-year run without a top flight win at Stamford Bridge, failing to muster a single shot or header on target. But they did not dwell on the defeat, focusing instead on the match they know could well decide their Premiership fate.

"It was a bad day for most of us," Per Frandsen was honest enough to admit, "but Saturday is the big game.

"It doesn't matter what happened at Chelsea, this is a whole new game. This is the big one!"

It would have taken an awful lot of pressure off had they managed to extend their winning streak or at least maintained their run of clean sheets. But the truth is that anything other than a Chelsea win would have been a travesty.

Ignore the scoreline. If Wanderers' Mighty Finn Jussi Jaaskelainen not been on top of his form or Chelsea had been more clinical with their finishing, the "goal difference" column, which could still be their salvation, would not look as healthy as it does today.

Mercifully, Allardyce did not have to talk in terms of being "turned over".

A thumping defeat at this point in time could have done some serious damage to morale. Instead Wanderers bowed to Chelsea's superiority, admitted they deserved nothing from the game and at least consoled themselves that the result was actually in the balance until referee Graham Barber blew his final whistle.

"We would have been lucky to have got a draw," Frandsen added. "They played well. They were all over us when they had the ball and it was difficult for us to get our passing going. They defended well and created a few chances as well. We didn't perform as well as we have done in the last six or seven games. We've been playing well but on the day they were better than us."

Wanderers drew some satisfaction from the fact that John Terry was forced to resort to desperate measures when he hacked a loose ball clear of Carlo Cudicini's crowded goalmouth in the second minute of overtime.

Jay-Jay Okocha's long throw into the area caused a rare moment of panic in the Chelsea defence with Gudni Bergsson, Pierre-Yves Andre and Henrik Pedersen all frantically trying to convert the chaos into an equaliser. But, unlike at the Reebok in November, when Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink snatched a late leveller, there was to be no dramatic twist in this tale and it was a relieved Ranieri who was able to deflect attention away from the out-of-sorts Dutchman by hailing the emergence of the kid he calls his "little lion", Carlton Cole.

At 6ft 4ins Cole can hardly be described as "little" but he is young and plays with courage, as the overworked Bolton defence will testify, and the way he took his matchwinning goal - his sixth of the season - suggests it will not be long before he is a mature predator.

Emmanuel Petit's pass made it but, in the context of so many misses by the boys in blue, it was by no means a formality that Cole would score as he took the ball in his long stride. Gudni Bergsson tried desperately to baulk him but the youngster stayed on his feet and managed to work the ball past Jaaskelainen.

"I thought he got a little bit lucky," the keeper lamented. "With Gudni there, the ball seemed to stick in his feet and I thought I might get it. But he managed to get it out and he did it quite quickly."

The win lifted Chelsea to within a point of third-placed Newcastle and kept them in pole position, well clear of Everton and Liverpool, in the race for the fourth Champions League place. But Ranieri will be concerned that they failed to turn their obvious superiority into a more convincing victory.

Once Cole had broken the deadlock, the triumvirate of Frank Lampard, Petit and Gianfranco Zola fashioned chance after chance only to be frustrated by their team-mates' squanderings and Jaaskelainen's brilliance. What did not fly off target, the big man saved and, although he modestly maintained that he was "only doing my job" he managed to drive Hasselbaink to distraction by winning a succession of personal duels.

Wanderers worked hard to maintain the run of form and results that have hoisted them clear of the bottom three but Chelsea had more quality than Sunderland, Spurs and Manchester City put together and Allardyce acknowledged in advance that they would need a miracle to make it four wins in a row.

Clutching at straws, Bergsson was close with a first half header and Djorkaeff was unfortunate not to find the target early in the second half when Wanderers finally managed to exert some pressure on the Chelsea goal.

But for all their efforts, neither Djorkaeff nor Okocha were anywhere near as influential as they have been while the number of saves Jaaskelainen had to make served to highlight the fact that neither Bergsson nor the previously outstanding Florent Laville looked at all comfortable, although the captain's demeanour was not helped by the damage Hasselbaink inflicted in an X-rated collision that brought tears to the eyes just before half-time.

Ivan Campo was the pick of the outfield players, managing to maintain his composure in a midfield in which Chelsea held all the aces.

Campo was closest to testing Cudicini when he fired a 35-yard screamer wide but as he made straight for the dressing room when he was substituted 10 minutes from time, it was surely the Hammers from London's East End rather than the West End boys he had on his mind.