The champions come to Home Park with a point to prove
Plymouth's six-game unbeaten run meets the machine at the top of the table, and the numbers say Chelsea have only one way to travel.
For ten days, Plymouth Argyle have been able to breathe. Sixth in the English Premier Division, forty-one points from twenty-seven games, and no league defeat since the turn of the year. It is the kind of run that makes a season feel like it belongs to a club again. Then the fixtures list does what it so often does to the hopeful, and drops the champions on them.
Chelsea arrive at Home Park on 26 February with twenty-six wins from twenty-eight league games, a goal difference of plus eighty-one and a lead of twenty-seven points at the top. The last time these sides met, in October, Chelsea won 5-0. On the evidence of recent weeks, the gap has not narrowed: Chelsea have won their last five in the league, scoring twenty-one goals and conceding six. This afternoon they beat Luton Town 6-0, while Plymouth were held to a 1-1 draw at Everton.
None of that means Plymouth should arrive frightened. But the numbers beneath the surface have been whispering for months that Plymouth are living on finishing and goalkeeping rather than control, and Chelsea are the side most likely to make that debt fall due.
The visitors will be without one of their regulars in attack, Nacho Valera, who twisted an ankle and has seven league games and six goals this season. Even so, the deeper story for Home Park is an old boy in blue. Jassem Abdulla, now twenty-five and a centre-back at Chelsea, spent two seasons at Plymouth at the start of his career, nine league games and one league goal, before moving on through Stoke City and Aston Villa to the very top of the game. He will know exactly what the Devon crowd sounds like, and exactly how quickly a lead at the top can feel like an obligation.
Plymouth's own position is secure enough for comfort. They sit sixth, level on points with Nottingham Forest and Everton below them, but the gap to the relegation zone is a comfortable fourteen points. The aim now is not survival but pushing on, and a point against the champions would feel like another small victory in a season already full of them.