Chelsea pegged back by Wolves after Lukaku reminds us of the player he can be

Chelsea were playing for the first time in front of their new owner Todd Boehly against Wolves, but things didn’t go quite according to plan.

The first game of a new era, or the last day of times that most associated with the club might want to forget? Despite his subsequent interventions, the Roman Abramovich reign ended abruptly with the application of sanctions by the British government on March 10. With the club removed from his control, it was a peculiarity of the process by which Chelsea were sold that he would get the final say on the new owners. What followed has been a period in relative purgatory. Chelsea might easily have simply been frozen as an asset and killed altogether, but allowances were made because of their institutional importance as a Premier League club.

Todd Boehly has won the race to run Chelsea, He was present and correct for this home game , in carefully selected casualwear and shades. He waved from the Gods with a smile on his face, but this was an arguably appropriately low-key arrival. Chelsea’s future may have been secured, but this didn’t feel like a chance to party. The team’s form in the league had been patchy, with four points from as many matches. Their last game ended in a 1-0 defeat to Chaos Everton. With a six-point buffer and just three games to play, they’ve probably already done enough to secure their Champions League place for next season. But Chelsea are crawling over the line rather than racing.

The club seems to have survived relatively intact. They’re likely to have lost a couple of players, but there’s every chance that Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen would have left the club at the end of this season anyway – and Christensen wasn’t playing here. It will be