The Chelsea FanCast looks back, season by season, to 50 Years of Chelsea history from 1970 to the present day.
Stamford Chidge is joined by Jonathan Kydd, Dan Silver and Mark Meehan to look back at the 1992-93 season.
The 1992-93 season saw the launch of the much-awaited Premier League and the end of football as we knew it! Changes included the dulcet tones of Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Referees in green shirts and the change to the back pass law with much panic among the goalkeeping fraternity who now had to clear the ball rather than pick it up. There were changes for Chelsea too as Ken Bates spent big in the transfer market bringing in Robert Fleck for £2.1m and Mick Harford among several others.
Being Chelsea there was little change on the pitch. Punching well above their weight for the first half of the season, Chelsea found themselves 2nd in the League in December. The second half of the season saw the inevitable with the wheels coming off. Knocked out of the FA Cup in the 3rd round and a quarter-final defeat in the Coca-Cola Cup to Crystal Palace led to a run of 12 games without a win and a slide to 11th in the table.
Inevitably manager Ian Porterfield was sacked and surprisingly replaced by 1970 Cup winning legend David Webb. Webb steadied the ship and Chelsea finished a respectable 11th but there was disappointment that we hadn’t achieved more given the quality of the squad and the excellent start.
In many respects the season was overshadowed by the career ending injury inflicted on star defender Paul Elliot by the odious Dean Saunders in the match against Liverpool at Anfield early in the season.
The 1992-93 season, with the launch of the Premier League, had a real ‘looking to the future’ feel, ably assisted by RBS handing Chelsea a 20-year lease with an option to buy Stamford Bridge. The decks were about to be cleared for Chelsea’s Blue revolution and Chelsea and football were never to be the same again.
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