Chelsea Football Club is aware of the problem Yossi Benayoun has had with his achilles, as reported by the Israel national federation today.
It has been managed in close consultation with his national team. Chelsea's medical staff will assess Yossi further on his return to our training ground at the weekend.
Carlo Ancelotti will be signing copies of his new book The Beautiful Games of an Ordinary Genius at the Megastore today (Wednesday).
The manager will be there between 4pm and 6pm. Anyone planning on coming along is advised to arrive early to avoid disappointment.
Due to time constraints, only copies of the book will be signed and we cannot guarantee everybody will be seen.
Ticket sale dates for our Champions League clash with Spartak Moscow have been announced, with seats going on sale tomorrow (Wednesday).
Priced at £11.50 each, tickets will be available to supporters on the Uefa Away Scheme from 7am online tomorrow (Wednesday 6 October) until 5pm on Thursday 7 October.
Season ticket holders then have until noon on Friday 8 October to purchase their seat.
After that, from 1pm on Friday, members will be able to buy a ticket for the game which takes place on Wednesday 19 October.
Chelsea have received an allocation of 3,000 tickets for this game. Also, due to shortness of time, supporters on the Uefa Away Scheme who do not purchase a ticket will not be removed from the scheme.
However, supporters who purchase a ticket but do not collect them will be removed from the scheme.
If you want to receive all ticket news first, direct to your mobile, subscribe to the Chelsea SMS Alerts service.
The players were given two days off training following the Arsenal win but Michael Essien kept himself busy by putting his thoughts down in his blog on the Official Chelsea Website.
He tells readers about the joy of scoring goals and a new nickname he has given himself.
Fans can comment on Michael's thoughts, so click on Blogs to read them...
While many of his Chelsea colleagues depart this week on international duty Michael Essien will be returning to training at Cobham, although he confirms his absence from the Ghana team is only a temporary state of affairs.
The 27-year-old missed the World Cup as he recovered from a chronic knee problem. He was back for the new Barclays Premier League season but didn't play a part in Ghana's opening Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in Swaziland last month.
It was due to an agreement reached with then Ghana coach Milovan Rajevac who has since departed.
'I spoke to the manager and he told me he is going to give me a break to get my fitness back on track,' explains Essien, 'and whenever I feeling like going back I should go back.
'It is unfortunate that he left, and we shall see who comes in but I will go back.'
Reports from Ghana state that former Chelsea players Marcel Desailly and Gianfranco Zola, our ex-manager Luiz Felipe Scolari plus former Spurs boss Juande Ramos have all applied for the national coach's job. A decision is expected soon.
Meanwhile after two days rest, on Wednesday Essien will begin early preparation for Chelsea's next game away to Aston Villa, boosted by the weekend win over Arsenal.
The midfield powerhouse has spoken to Chelsea TV about finesse he has added to his game with several defence-splitting passes on view recently, and about the chance he had late in the game to make it 3-0. He was denied by Lukasz Fabianski.
'I think my passing is getting better, what I need to work on is my goal scoring,' Essien told the club's own channel.
'When you have the ball you have to be calm, and you have to look for the space before you receive the ball. I try to do that and I am getting my passes right.
'It was a good pass from Yury [Zhirkov],' he said of the Arsenal chance, 'and when I was about to shoot I saw the goalkeeper coming forward and closing the angle, so I tried to chip the ball over him and it was a good save.'
Chelsea's trip to Villa Park comes at the same moment as last season, straight after the October international break. It is a chance to improve on the last campaign when we lost the game 2-1.
'It is always difficult to go to Villa Park, they make it very difficult,' admits Essien.
'But we think about ourselves and how to go out there and get three points. The manager has told us to play the ball very quickly as soon as we have it and that's what we try to do.'
Michael Essien will be blogging again on the Official Chelsea Website tomorrow (Wednesday).
Limiting health and safety measures may be a current discussion point at government level but columnist Giles Smith calls for new ones at Stamford Bridge, and not without good cause...
People have been asking, since the weekend and that horrible, leg-breaking tackle on Newcastle's Hatem Ben Arfa by the serially offending Nigel de Jong of Manchester City, whether football is becoming unacceptably dangerous.
Has the risk of serious physical injury grown to the point where it is no longer tolerable as merely the inevitable, if unfortunate, by-product of a contact sport? Can anything be done to legislate against the game's seemingly increasing levels of peril?
These are important questions, clearly. And I suspect the concerned fan will want to look, in this area, at free kicks by Alex, too.
Yes, I appreciate that nobody has got hurt - yet. But, since Sunday, when the ball came within centimetres of removing the heads of at least two Arsenal players standing in the wall, it had been emphatically clear that an Alex free kick now officially represents one of the game's clearest and most present dangers.
That's the second time in as many games that our centre back has gone 'Code Red' from a dead ball situation. The first time, against Marseille in the Champions League, the ball was stopped by a post, thus preventing almost certain carnage in Row D of the Matthew Harding Lower, involving (but not necessarily limited to) the absolute ruin of someone's hotdog.
The second time, against Arsenal, the ball, apparently en route for Earls Court, was finally intercepted, still smoking, by the net - though I'm still not entirely sure how, nor why, even after the net failed to disintegrate, the impact didn't end up lifting the entire frame of the goal and repositioning it somewhere around row M, again with possibly dire consequences for people seated in the vicinity and their hotdogs.
Incidentally, it's traditional to moan about how badly-made things are these days, by comparison with the way they were manufactured in the past, and how traditional craftsmanship has (quite literally) gone the way of the horse and cart. So let's at least take this welcome opportunity to make a heart-gladdening exception in the case of the goal nets at Stamford Bridge, which are self-evidently more robust than they have ever been (and certainly more robust than the ones which let in that Alan Hudson 'goal that never was' against Ipswich in the 1970-71 season).
Still, with Alex absolutely on fire at the moment and the obvious contender, from this point in, to take any free kick awarded within his natural range (ie, anywhere technically north of Battersea Bridge), you don't need to be an overly anxious person to spot the potential for an imminent catastrophe - at the point, say, when the centre back again catches one absolutely right but aims it just inches wide.
Fore-armed is everything in these situations, which is why we propose implementing forthwith the following simple, Alex-related safety measures at Stamford Bridge (and at any other grounds which are willing and far-sighted enough to back our initiative).
Spectators most at risk, with seats in the immediate vicinity of the goals at both ends, could be issued with a Kevlar-based, riot shield-style device. It could be stowed under the seat when not in use, and could feature a transparent area near the top, so that one could continue to watch the game while the shield was deployed, and take any further evasive action, as necessary.
Meanwhile, specially trained marksmen could be positioned at key points high in the relevant stands, whose duty it would be to 'take out' the ball the moment it left the playing area and began to pose a direct threat to the public. (These marksmen would have to move pretty sharpish, obviously, but isn't that the whole point of marksmen?)
The marksmen could also help the stewards organise an evacuation after the awarding of the free kick, if this was considered, at the time, to be the safest course.
With those simple steps implemented, the worst of the peril would be averted and Alex would be free to continue endangering the heads of Arsenal defenders (and anyone else who draws the short straw, in terms of wall-forming) with an entirely clear conscience, knowing that at least the innocent weren't going to suffer.
How you annul the danger represented by Nigel de Jong, on the other hand, defeats me, although Bert Van Marwijk, the coach of Holland, seems to be onto something. He has dropped him.
On the subject of foreign squads, it won't have escaped your notice that the Premier League is once again suspended and that, as a consequence, we are forced yet again to make our own entertainment at the weekend, as if these were Victorian times.
Incredible. Merely three weeks after the regrettable intrusion of the September international week, we find ourselves only just inside October and confronted by another one - though this time with a pathetic added twist: it's an international week without an international in it. (England, at any rate, aren't playing until the following Tuesday.)
These crude interruptions to the season's flow, just when we are clearly on a roll and Manchester United are struggling to come away with a point from Sunderland, seem to me worse than unhelpful. If anything in the modern game is screaming for an intervention by the legislators, the scandal of disruptive international weeks - with or without internationals in them, but especially without - surely is it.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, I intend to gather my family around the piano in the parlour for some singing, after which we will go out and hit a hoop with a stick. Well, what else is there to do in times like these?
Qualifiers for the European Championships and the Africa Cup of Nations in 2012 began last month and continue over the next fortnight.
There are also friendly internationals, Under 21 and junior games taking place.
Here is the Official Chelsea Website's round-up of our players' involvement:
SENIOR INTERNATIONALS
Ashley Cole and John Terry - Euro 2010 qualifier: England v Montenegro - Tuesday 12 October (Wembley).
Petr Cech - Euro 2010 qualifiers: Czech Republic v Scotland - Friday 8 October (Prague), Liechtenstein v Czech Republic - Tuesday 12 October (Vaduz).
Florent Malouda - Euro 2010 qualifiers: France v Romania - Friday 8 October (Paris), France v Luxembourg - Tuesday 12 October (Metz).
Branislav Ivanovic - Euro 2010 qualifiers: Serbia v Estonia - Friday 8 October (Belgrade), Italy v Serbia - Tuesday 12 October (Genoa).
Yury Zhirkov - Euro 2010 qualifiers:Ireland v Russia - Friday 8 October (Dublin), Macedonia v Russia - Tuesday 12 October (Skopje).
Ramires - Friendlies: Iran v Brazil - Thursday 7 October (Abu Dhabi), Brazil v Ukraine - Monday 11 October (Pride Park, Derby). Alex will not play due to the thigh injury sustained against Arsenal.
John Mikel Obi was called up for Nigeria's African Nations Cup qualifier away in Guinea on Sunday. However that game is now subject to Fifa's suspension of Nigeria from international competition due to government interference in the sport. The suspension was announced yesterday (Monday).
Neither Didier Drogba nor Salomon Kalou are in the Ivory Coast squad for a match away toBurundi.
UNDER 21S
These set of fixtures are two-legged play offs for places in the European Championship Finals in Denmark next summer.
Ryan Bertrand, Jack Cork, Michael Mancienne and Daniel Sturridge - England v Romania - Friday 8 October (Carrow Road, Norwich), Romania v England - Tuesday 12 October (Botosani).
Fabio Borini - Italy v Belarus - Friday 8 October (Rieti),Belarus v Italy - Tuesday 12 October (Borisov).
Jeffrey Bruma and Patrick van Aanholt - Netherlands v Ukraine - Saturday 9 October (Rotterdam), Ukraine v Netherlands - Tuesday 12 October (Kiev).
YOUTH INTERNATIONALS
Gael Kakuta - Under 20 Friendlies - France v Portugal - Tuesday 5 October, France v Juventus - Monday 11 October.
Josh McEachran and Aziz Deen-Conteh Uefa U19 Qualifying Tournament - England, Belgium, Cyprus and Albania - Saturday 2 to Thursday 14 October.
Milan Lalkovic -Uefa U19 Qualifying Tournament - Slovakia, Malta, Netherlands & Slovenia - Friday 1 to Wednesday 13 October.
Anton Rodgers - Uefa U19 Qualifying Tournament - Rep of Ireland, Serbia, Luxembourg & Bulgaria -Saturday 2 to Thursday 14 October.
Nathaniel Chalobah - Uefa U17 Qualifying Tournament - England, Georgia, Sweden, Poland - Wednesday 13 October - Sunday 24 October.
