For the second preseason friendly of the summer tour, Chelsea will take on customary punching bags Tottenham Hotspur tomorrow night in Sydney, which will be the last bit of action for us in Australia before moving on to the Southeast Asia portion of the tour.
Spurs are of course familiar foes source of three points in the Premier League, and that will add an extra bit of spice to this preseason friendly. As Josh Acheampong put it, “there are no friendlies” when it comes to Tottenham.
That said, this is still just a friendly, for both teams. The main focus is fitness, avoiding injuries, and molding the team in Xabi Alonso’s image. The manager was decently happy with the 6-4 goalfest in our first friendly, against A-League side Western Sydney Wanderers, but he also saw a lot of familiar failings, which he’d want us to work on as much as possible.
“There were moments that we were struggling to find solutions, and we need to have this. The positives are that we corrected them, but there were moments that the game management is something that we can learn from today. […] You need to have this game intelligence to do the things. And we will need to do it quick, because the competition is in just a month, and we want to get ready for that. But we need to manage that. That’s so important in football nowadays.”
-Xabi Alonso; source: ESPN
And Spurs are likely to provide a tougher challenge in every regard than WSW.
Date / Time: Saturday, August 1, 2026, 7:45pm local time; 10:45 BST; 5:45am EDT
Venue: Accor Stadium, Sydney, Australia
Forecast: Another mild winter’s day in Sydney, possibly with a shower or two
On TV: none; elsewhere
Streaming: Paramount+ (USA), FanCode (India); StarTimes (NGA); CFC+ (UK/int’l) — CFC+ is Chelsea’s new-ish premium(?) streaming service so if your region does not have a rights-holder, you can watch there for £9.99 (or buy all six preseason games for just a little more at £14.99; or subscribe for the whole year for a little bit more at £19.99)
Chelsea team news: Since Tuesday’s friendly, Filip Jörgensen has left camp to complete a move to RC Strasbourg and Moisés Caicedo and Nicolas Jackson have shown up, though are not likely to feature in match action just yet. With nearly 30 players on the tour now, and a couple more joining shortly (Geovany Quenda and the newly reinstated Mykhailo Mudryk), this game might be the last opportunity for some of the youngsters in the squad. Of the kids, Landon Emenalo and Dastan Satpaev have arguably impressed the most thus far, so hopefully that won’t apply to them just yet.
Also since Tuesday, Chelsea completed the signing of Maxence Lacroix (currently on post-World Cup holidays still) and are close to finalizing the signings of kindergarten cops Danny Welbeck and Jordan Henderson. They will surely join the tour at some point soon as well (alongside Morgan Rogers, Malo Gusto and Enzo Fernández, barring any new bits of transfer drama).
Alonso opted for a very youthful starting lineup against Western Sydney, before introducing the big-hitters late in the second half (including João Pedro, who scored three times in the span of about ten minutes). I’d guess the manager will go slightly stronger look to start this one.
Spurs team news: Having barely survived the drop last season, it’s been a monumental summer of rebuilding for Spurs under Roberto De Zerbi, which has seen them spend nearly a quarter billion pounds on Sandro Tonali, Mateus Fernandes, and Jan Paul van Hecke, while also adding Marcos Senesi, Andy Robertson, and Martin Dúbravka on free transfers. No one of note has left (yet), unless you count Yves Bissouma (released) and Luka Vušković, who was on loan last season before going to Brighton for a cool £50m. Remember the name before BlueCo inevitably come calling for him in a couple years for three times as much.
Speaking of Chelsea players, Conor Gallagher is hoping that the new season will be like a fresh start for all involved. I wish them zero success in that regard. Sorry, Con.
“It is a lot more enjoyable to not be in the position we were at the end of last season. it is a fresh start with fresh players. Everyone is so happy […] it doesn’t feel like a new club but it feels like a fresh kind of start. Everyone is excited to make things better.”
-Conor Gallagher; source: Tottenham Hotspur FC
This will be Spurs’ fourth official preseason match already, having played (and beaten) MK Dons, Auckland FC, and, earlier this week, Sydney FC. They needed penalties to earn that last victory, but any concerns about that paled in comparison to the concerns they had about new signing Fernandes, who missed the game entirely with a knee concern picking up in training. Initial fears of an ACL tear would subside, though the 22-year-old also won’t feature against us, with what’s being called “fatigue” in his calf. Van de Ven will also miss out, for similar reasons (in fact, he’s not played at all in preseason yet following his involvement at the World Cup), while James Maddison has been shut down for the rest of preseason as he tries to complete his recovery from the ACL tear that caused him to miss practically all of last season.
View from the enemy: Cartilage Free Captain
Previously: Chelsea did the double over Spurs last season, and the season before that, and the season before that as well. That’s six wins in a row, if you’re counting, and we’re definitely are. That last time we played Spurs in a “friendly” however was five years ago, under Thomas Tuchel, when we battled to a 2-2 draw at a nearly full, post-pandemic Stamford Bridge. Hakim Ziyech scored twice for the Champions of Europe before the visitors came back with two goals of their own in the final thirty or so minutes.