Chelsea 1-1 Liverpool: John Terry and Steven Gerrard on target as Reds hold champions

A 1-1 draw for Liverpool at Chelsea all-but ended their hopes of finishing in the Premier League's top four this season.
 

                                                                        

Steven Gerrard was given a standing ovation by both Liverpool and Chelsea fans when he was substituted in the 78th minute

John Terry headed the hosts in front early on, before Steven Gerrard equalised shortly before half time.

The visitors enjoyed more of the possession in the second half and Philippe Coutinho went close as he fired wide, but Liverpool couldn't find the winner they needed to close the gap on Manchester United in fourth.

The result means Jose Mourinho continues his unbeaten record against Liverpool, and leaves Brendan Rodgers’ men six points off fourth place with two games left, effectively ending their Champions League hopes owing to their inferior goal difference compared to United.

                                                                        

Martin Tyler hails Gerrard

Liverpool afforded the newly crowned champions a guard of honour as they came on to the pitch, but Chelsea were in no mood to relax and Cesc Fabregas came out firing, catching Raheem Sterling with a late challenge to earn a booking inside the first minute.

The visitors then allowed Blues skipper Terry too much space in the box from Fabregas’ corner, with the defender rising above Rickie Lambert to power a header into the corner as Simon Mignolet and Gerrard failed to keep it out, and Chelsea were ahead inside five minutes.

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• Liverpool v C Palace

The party spirit was in full swing as Chelsea looked more expansive than in their recent matches, with the pressure of securing the title lifted from their shoulders. Diego Costa took a seat among the fans to watch his team-mates in action, with the striker ruled out due to a hamstring injury.

But Liverpool had something to play for and enjoyed some spells of possession, with Philippe Coutinho going close with a couple of efforts, his first deflecting wide off Filipe Luis from 20 yards before he cut inside Kurt Zouma and saw a low shot saved by Thibaut Courtois.

                                                                        

Gerrard believes Liverpool need to build for next season

For most of the half Chelsea looked comfortable and the visitors were struggling with the threat of Mourinho’s men down the left flank, but they drew level after Branislav Ivanovic was booked for hauling down Adam Lallana near the corner flag in the 44th minute.

Jordan Henderson whipped in the resulting free kick and Gerrard popped up unmarked at the far post, nodding it down into the net to level things right before the break.

                                                                        

Before kick-off, Liverpool gave champions Chelsea the guard of honour

The visitors started the second half the brighter of the two sides, and Coutinho had a glorious opportunity to put his side in front, but he could only fire his first-time shot wide of the post after good work by Raheem Sterling down the left.

Willian had a couple of chances in quick succession for the hosts, drilling one shot just wide of the far post from a tight angle before seeing a second effort diverted behind by Martin Skrtel from the same position.

The hosts introduced Nemanja Matic on the hour mark, and Chelsea almost immediately looked more solid in the middle of the park, but Liverpool were still seeing plenty more of the ball.

                                                                        

Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho pays tribute to Gerrard

Chelsea were creating some good openings, though, and Fabregas bundled his way through the Liverpool defence before firing a low left-footed effort, only to see Skrtel make another excellent last-ditch block.

With 10 minutes remaining, Gerrard was brought off and Mourinho led the applause around Stamford Bridge as fans of both sides paid their respects to the outgoing Liverpool midfielder.

                                                                        

Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers was disappointed with John Terry's goal
 

Coutinho’s deflected effort, meanwhile, was saved by Courtois late on, while Jordan Henderson fired an 18-yard volley wide of the target, with neither side able to find the winner.

Rodgers men next face Crystal Palace as Gerrard prepares for the emotional occasion of his last match for Liverpool at Anfield.

Player ratings

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W Brom v Chelsea

 

Chelsea: Courtois (7), Ivanovic (7), Zouma (6), Terry (7), Luis (6), Mikel (5), Loftus-Cheek (6), Willian (7), Fabregas (6), Hazard (5), Remy (5).

Used subs: Cahill (7), Matic (7), Cuadrado (6).

Liverpool: Mignolet (6), Johnson (6), Lovren (6), Skrtel (7), Can (4), Gerrard (7), Coutinho (8), Henderson (6), Lallana (6), Sterling (7), Lambert (4).

Used subs: Lucas (6), Ibe (6), Sinclair (6).

Man of the match: Philippe Coutinho

Arsenal v Swansea City preview: Gunners going for second

Arsenal will remain on course for their highest Premier League finish in 10 years if they can beat Swansea at the Emirates on Monday Night Football.

 

Arsene Wenger has not led his team to a top two finish since the 2004/05 season but victories in their remaining games against Swansea, Manchester United, Sunderland and West Brom would put that right.

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The Gunners have won seven of their last eight league games and will be confident of remaining unbeaten for the rest of the season and pipping Manchester City to the runners up spot.

Swansea have already recorded their best ever Premier League points tally and could still finish seventh, ahead of Southampton. That would mean Europa League qualification should Arsenal beat Aston Villa in the FA Cup final.

Team news

Jamie Redknapp looks ahead to the game between Arsenal and Swansea.

Arsenal midfielder Aaron Ramsey is a major doubt for Monday's Premier League visit of Swansea after a blow to the leg sustained at Hull.

Danny Welbeck (knee) is almost certainly out but could return the following week against former club Manchester United.

Mikel Arteta (ankle), Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (groin) and Mathieu Debuchy (hamstring) remain absent, along with Abou Diaby (knee).

                   

Bafetimbi Gomis: Scored the winner for Swansea at the Liberty Stadium

Swansea striker Bafetimbi Gomis is set to be thrust back into action with loan signing Nelson Oliveira unlikely to play again this season.

Gomis has missed the last three games with a hamstring injury but has been back in training this week and his return could not be more timely with Oliveira having picked up an ankle injury against Stoke last weekend.

Spanish defender Jordi Amat (broken metatarsal) has joined Oliveira, Kyle Naughton, Tom Carroll and Wayne Routledge on the sidelines but full-backs Jazz Richards and Dwight Tiendalli are available following respective loan spells at Fulham and Middlesbrough.

                                                                        

Swansea manager Garry Monk reveals Bafetimbi Gomis will be fit for their final three games of the season

 

Danny Welbeck has scored three goals in four Barclays Premier League games against Swansea City.
21 of the last 22 goals in this fixture in all competitions have been scored in the second half of the match.

The two sides have met seven times in the Premier League with three wins apiece and one draw. Swansea have had to come from behind to get seven of the 10 points they have earned against the Gunners.
Arsenal have lost just one of their last 34 Premier League matches at Emirates Stadium (W24 D9 L1).

The Gunners have conceded just two goals in their last seven Premier League games at the Emirates.
Ahead of this matchday, no player has assisted as many Premier League goals as Santi Cazorla (28) since he made his PL debut in August 2012.

                                                                        

Arsene Wenger says his target is to keep Carl Jenkinson at Arsenal

Arsenal named the same XI for the fourth time in a row in the Premier League last time out – the last time they did this was in March-April 1996.

The Gunners have not named the same team in five successive matches in the Premier League since January 1994.

Aaron Ramsey has had a hand in seven goals (three goals, four assists) in his last six Premier League appearances.

After scoring a combined total of three goals in his first two PL campaigns combined, Ki Sung-yueng has scored eight times in 2014-15.

Merson's prediction
I cannot see anything other than an Arsenal win here, and I am going to go 3-0 as I think they are playing very, very well at the moment - very, very well - and it happens every year, but you would like to think that next season might be the season… might be!

Kevin Johnson can test Anthony Joshua says Glenn McCrory

Anthony Joshua: Goes head to head with Kevin Johnson

Durable American Kevin Johnson will present Anthony Joshua with his first genuine test when the pair meet on May 30, says Glenn McCrory.

 

The Olympic heavyweight champion, 25, stopped Brazil's Raphael Zumbano Love inside two rounds on Saturday Fight Night to improve his record to 12 knockouts from 12 fights and now faces a step up against Johnson, live on Sky Sports Box Office.

The opponent was a lamb to the slaughter on Saturday. He didn't seem to have offensive prowess whatsoever - I don't know how he'd accumulated 26 knockouts. It seemed like Love wanted to make peace with Anthony Joshua!

You can't blame AJ and he's great. I'm a big fan. I think he's terrific, but they've just got a bit of a problem on their hands because he's fought 12 very basic, easy opponents and never gone past three rounds.

Now, he's going to go in with a decent hardcore American who's never been stopped in Kevin Johnson.

Johnson has been the distance with Vitali Klitschko and comes with a little bit of fire in his belly. He looks in good shape, is saying the right things and doesn't look afraid and why should he? He's been in with bigger, stronger more accomplished fighters than Joshua.

We've got a similar position as we had with David Price a couple of years ago. He'd been fed run-of-the-mill heavyweights and was suddenly put in with a guy who wasn't afraid, could take punches and would go back at him. He wasn't ready because he hadn't had that preparation.

I'm a little bit worried that Joshua's missing that. In 12 fights, you need to get something of a test. Yes he's good and we're all big fans. I just feel if Johnson takes him past six and starts rattling around the chin, has he got the professionalism and experience to handle that? It's a doubt in my mind.

Anthony Joshua made easy work of Raphael Zumbano Love

Price was found out in the amateurs and found out in the professionals. We would have answered more questions if Joshua was fighting him because he'd have had to defend the jab and be up against someone tall.

No disrespect to Price but I don't think he's going to be a world champion. The tough fighters will know now they can hit him on the whiskers and he'll go, so they've lost that fear.
Johnson is a man. So far, Joshua has only fought fighters of a certain level and I guarantee not one of them thought they were in with a chance of winning. The guy last night didn't even look like he thought he was going to hit him. He didn't throw one punch in anger.

If Joshua has a tough fight and comes through to win on points, there's nothing wrong with that at all. You don't have to knock everybody out. Tyson didn't knock everybody out - James Tillis took him the distance in his early days and he learned an awful lot in that fight. I sparred with Tillis too and he taught me an awful lot!

Joshua is not the finished article and he's not going to knock out every single person he ever fights. That's just not going to happen. The reality is that somebody is going to stand there, grit their teeth and slap him back in the mouth, which is something we haven't seen yet. Johnson is the first genuine threat.

Specimen
I also notice when I see AJ on Twitter he's hanging off apparatus, lifting weights or climbing ropes. He wants to look the part and be a fine specimen but he doesn't want to try to be Conan the Barbarian! I know he's a great athlete but so was Frank Bruno but people will tell you he was too stiff.

                                           

Watch Anthony Joshua knock out Raphael Zumbano Love

Lennox Lewis was a far more fluid boxer because he wasn't really a weight lifter. I'm not saying he wasn't strong because he was - I can vouch for his strength! But he wasn't a weight-lifting kind of guy.

I am concerned because I want to see Anthony go all the way. I see him as a world champion and a great world champion.

He's coming under scrutiny now, as he will as he goes further and further. The world's press and fans will do that. He's done things like stick his tongue out a couple of times. I can understand the exuberance of winning and wouldn't want anyone to quell that, but he can't afford to lose his class.
So far, he's come across as classy and I just hope he can keep it together.

Having said all that, my prediction is still that Joshua will stop him. I think he's still good enough to become the first man to stop Kevin Johnson. It's a big shout and I think we'll see him hit on the chin for the first time, but I think he'll come through.

You can see Joshua has got a bit of steel in him. When Johnson said he was going to stop him, you saw it fired him up. That's what we need to see because nobody else have ever done that.

Jamie does us proud

I must say I thought Jamie McDonnell was superb in defending his WBA bantamweight title in Texas last night.

To box the way he did in front of such a top-class, credible and tough world champion, showed there was no gulf in class and he was actually better than Tomoki Kameda.

He rose to the occasion and proved himself as one of the top fighters in the world at that division. It was really quality stuff from Jamie.

The knockdown punch was the sort of clean punch that can be a match-winner. Sometimes you don't quite recover, the colly-wobbles creep in to your brain and you go out the next round and get done - but Jamie didn't do that.

After that early set-back, he came out the next round, all guns blazing and put him back in his place so that's an excellent, excellent performance from McDonnell at the very highest level.

 

Pep Guardiola rubbishes link with Manchester City job

Pep Guardiola: Says he will still be at Bayern Munich next season

Pep Guardiola has rubbished weekend reports that he might be leaving Bayern Munich and heading to Manchester City this summer to replace Manuel Pellegrini.

 

City boss Pellegrini has come under mounting pressure in recent months over his side's stuttering European form and their limp defence of the Premier League title.

With two of Guardiola's former cohorts at Barcelona - Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain -  now installed in the boardroom at the Etihad, the rumours have gathered momentum.

But speaking ahead of the second leg of Bayern's Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, Guardiola waa adamant that he will be staying in Bavaria next season.

He said: "I've said 200 million times before, I have another year on my contract. I will be here next year. There's nothing more to say. Next season I will be here and that's all there is to it."

The 3-0 defeat at the Nou Camp in the first leg of the Champions league tie followed by a 1-0 loss to Augsburg in the league on Saturday further fanned speculation over Guardiola's future after what was the fourth straight loss for Bayern in all competitions, something that had not happened since 1991.

Guardiola left Barcelona in the summer of 2012 after winning 14 titles - including two Champions League trophies - in a four-year stint in Catalonia.

The 44-year-old joined Bayern a year later and has led them to back-to-back Bundesliga titles.

Conclusions from the Spanish GP

Rosberg makes inroads on a long road back; Ferrari fall back when they should have gone forward; Wolff will leave a lasting legacy;



Rosberg is back, if he ever went away
That’s the thing with Nico Rosberg; when he’s good, he’s very good. By any measure, this was a consummately impressive weekend for the German as he consistently out-paced his Mercedes team-mate, took a deserved pole position and then sauntered off into the distance on race day while Lewis Hamilton was given a harsh reminder of just how restrictive Circuit de Catalunya can be. It’s F1’s version of a straitjacket.

2015 Drivers' Championship
Not that Hamilton appeared unduly ruffled afterwards – or had any cause to be. His pace, once he found a way around Sebastian Vettel, bordered on the phenomenal. It had taken him six and a half track sessions to find it, but once he discovered the sweetspot of his W06 he closed in on Rosberg at a rate that couldn’t entirely be attributed to the German electing for cruise control. Moreover, Hamilton still has control in the title race. Unless reliability plays an uneven hand, 20 points is a substantial margin even at this stage. The German has made a step back towards parity with Hamilton but the world champion is still three or four paces ahead.



Ferrari’s upgrades didn’t work
Actually, that’s not necessarily strictly true. Ferrari’s upgrades may have worked in so far as they generated a performance gain. It’s just that they didn’t work to their intended goal: closing the gap to Mercedes. After being just a few seconds behind in Bahrain, and ahead in Malaysia, Ferrari were a disconcerting 45 seconds adrift of the victorious Mercedes in Barcelona this weekend – a lifetime by F1’s standards.

Few would have predicted such an outcome at the start of the weekend when Mercedes were conspicuously quiet about the new developments they were introducing. Was their reticence a cunning ruse to catch the opposition unawares? Perhaps, but when the chequered flag fell on Sunday, Williams were far closer to the lead Ferrari than they had been in Bahain despite only introducing, according to Valtteri Bottas, ‘small’ updates. Was it simply the case that the Circuit de Catalunya simply didn’t suit the Ferrari? Or could their relative downturn be linked to the crackdown, issued on the morning of the race by the FIA, on fuel-flow rates and pressure? 

The alternative conclusion is rather less palatable: Ferrari have peaked already and Mercedes are once again as uncatchable as they were in 2014.

                   

Kimi's Saturday habit has become career threatening
Last month, Kimi Raikkonen bemoaned his spate of qualifying mistakes a “habit”. But it’s a particularly bad habit to be in at this stage of this season. In Monaco, Saturdays are nine-tenths of Sunday’s law, while Barcelona has become the definitive Noah’s Ark circuit, a place where all the cars go two-by-two with only the Williamses and Ferraris the exceptions to prove the rule on Saturday this year and Raikkonen and Felipe Massa the odd men out. When every other driver was within two places of his team-mate in qualifying, Felipe and Kimi were four adrift of their yardsticks.

And from there, there was no way back. Not around Barcelona, a circuit which doesn't believe in overtaking and is so behind the times that even modern ruses such as DRS remain stubbornly irrelevant. Nor will there any way back around the mean streets of Monaco in two weeks unless a miracles strikes or the habit is finally broken. With the Finn’s contract up at the end of the year, and Ferrari dallying over an extension, Raikkonen’s crippling Saturday miserable form has assumed a larger, more threatening dimension. Unless he kicks the habit, it’s the Finn who may be getting the boot in November.

                                   

F1 is currently blessed with young talent
There’s Valtteri Bottas, still only in his third season of F1, there’s Felipe Nasr, easily missed while at Sauber but surely destined for bigger and better things, there’s Max Verstappen, the youngest points-scorer in F1’s history, and then there’s Carlos Sainz, the afterthought when it comes to Toro Rosso starlets but very much a potential major talent in the making.

The first outstanding feature of his performance weekend is that it was delivered in the spotlight of driving at his home race and under the weight of pressure of giving his compatriots something to cheer about. The second was the level of improvement Sainz has already achieved since appearing rather more rough than diamond in pre-season testing. 

And there's no lack of racing or sporting intelligence either. Speaking after the race about his near-miss with the Red Bull of Daniil Kvyat into the first corner on the lap, Sainz confirmed that only took avoiding action across the chicane in order not to bother big brother. "To avoid an accident with a Red Bull, as you can imagine, I went straight on," he told reporters. With political prudence like that in the heat of battle, he'll go far.

 

                   

Wolff is unlikely to be F1’s next female racer
Susie Wolff has gone closer than most to landing an F1 seat. And she has certainly gone closer than any other woman over the last twenty years, becoming the first female to participate in an F1 session since 1992 when she drove in practice at Silverstone last July.

But her dream of lining up on an F1 grid is now, if not almost over, fading fast and on Friday night in Spain, she sounded resigned to climbing up the mountain but not quite scaling the summit. “I’m close [to becoming a race driver] but I’m also very, very far away,” she conceded in the wake of her P1 outing. It was a fitting summation after finishing 0.8 seconds behind Felipe Massa in the P1 timesheets – creditable and close, but, again, just not quite close enough.

The writing has been on the wall for Susie's dream even since Williams appointed Adrian Sutil as their reserve driver in the wake of Valtteri Bottas's early-season injury. But Susie’s achievements ought not to be understated or misunderstood. She has become the poster-girl for the next generation of aspiring female racers and by taking that critical first step, she has paved the way for the final leap to be taken. "I believe 100 per cent a woman can compete at this level,” she told reporters in Spain. She has gone a long way, perhaps as far as 95%, to proving her own point too. No matter that she will not be F1’s next female racer; instead, her lasting legacy will have been to speed up the advent of the next. The girl did great.