Chelsea 3 Valencia 0

By Rory Smith

It should never have come to this. When Valencia captain David Albelda spoke to former team-mate Juan Mata earlier in their respective Champions League campaigns he told him – only half in jest – to make sure Chelsea beat Bayer Leverkusen to help send both teams through.

Valencia's dire financial straits are not just due to the mismanagement of the club's former president Juan Soler. Real Madrid and Barcelona have also wasted plenty of money since the turn of the century but the financial cushions provided by their inflated shares of television revenues always break the fall.

When Chelsea's owner Roman Abramovich, paid a world-record compensation fee of €15 million (£13.3m) to Porto for Andre Villas-Boas last summer, it was not with the primary intention of winning the Carling Cup. So while a home defeat by Liverpool last Tuesday – the second in 10 days – was as welcome as a warm glass of lager, the disappointment was more easily digested. Defeat in the fourth most important competition of the season is one thing, but going out of the Champions' League this Tuesday would be something else.

Chelsea coach insists he will not be sacked this season... and players are behind him

Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas is likely to keep his job even if the club are eliminated from the Champions League next week, though the first substantial sense that his players are beginning to doubt him emerged after the desperately poor Carling Cup defeat to Liverpool on Tuesday.

Manchester United 1 Crystal Palace 2 (aet)

Andre Villas-Boas believes that the mounting anxiety at Stamford Bridge is inhibiting his attempts to rectify his side's abject home form, with the Chelsea manager acutely aware of the need for his team's performances to improve sharply if their season is not to fall apart before Christmas.

I'm sadder than a drowned shoe, sadder than the sweat of the ill ... as sad as the first bus of the day when dawn breaks, as sad as a lawyer's underpants," runs one of Tomás Segovia's poems, and this curious, compelling mixture of the lyrical and the drily humorous, the melancholic and the romantic, helped make Segovia one of the most outstanding of the so-called "poets of exile" during Franco's dictatorship, and a key figure in modern Mexican literature.

For this week's Insider's Guide, Ted Wake, director of sales and marketing at short-break specialist Kirker Holidays (kirkerholidays .com), offers his 10 tips for a holiday in the Spanish region of Valencia.

Valencia's Juan Mata was undergoing a medical in west London last night after Chelsea agreed a fee of £23.5m.

There are some great deals at Wilkinson's homeware store this week, with garden furniture sets reduced by up to 50 per cent online.