RUN-INS REMEMBERED

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This Article Is From chelseafc.com

'You don't want to look too far ahead. Concentrate on yourselves every week; never take a game lightly whether the team's at the top or the bottom of the league - they're all as potentially difficult at this stage. It's just about focus and taking that focus into every game. We have to get our own stuff right and give it everything. That's all we can do.'
- Frank Lampard, March 2014

The current season is now in its final quarter, that uniquely exciting period for all football fans who have hopes for their team, and to whet the appetite for the weeks ahead, the official Chelsea website looks back on five of our more memorable and varied run-ins in recent years.

We start with the 1998/99 season when we stood toe-to-toe for a time with Manchester United and Arsenal in the contest for the league title, and qualified for the Champions League for the very first time.

Attention then turns to a season that ended in last-day drama in 2003 as we again hunted down a precious Champions League position.

Three tilts at the title complete the selection, the 'closedown', as Jose Mourinho deemed it after the brilliant 2004/05 campaign, the exhausting and eventful end to 2006/07, and the near-perfect climax to 2009/10.

1998/99
First up, we travel back 15 years to a Chelsea side that had discovered some impressive and, at the time, unfamiliar consistency under the stewardship of player-manager Gianluca Vialli…

We had gone top of the table on Boxing Day in the midst of what was then a club record of 21 unbeaten games in England's top flight; it was also the longest unbeaten run that season by any team in Europe. But that Christmas success at Southampton Cheap Soccer Jerseys was marred by a knee ligament injury to one of the season's best players, Gustavo Poyet. Our injury list was lengthened by the long-term absence of strikers Pierluigi Casiraghi and, in the new year, Tore Andre Flo.

Embroiled in a three-way race for the title as a dramatic Premiership season reached its climax, three consecutive draws in April put paid to our hopes of winning the championship for only the second time in our history. In the end, our third-placed finish - four points behind winners Manchester United, who were on their way to the Treble - was our best since 1970 and just reward for a term of continuous achievement; in contrast to the great peaks and troughs that marked so many of our seasons either side of that 1998/99 campaign.

Our third and final league defeat of the season - a 1-0 home reverse to West Ham for whom Frank Lampard was outstanding (pictured below) - was the precursor to a 10-game run-in that included six matches away from home. The first three of those were won Spain Soccer Jersey World Cup impressively before a fourth game on the road in succession was drawn 0-0 at Middlesbrough, by no means a disastrous result.