Chelsea vs. Wrexham, FC Series Friendly: Live blog; highlights

Welcome to the first game of the 2023 preseason summer tour of the USA, coming live to you from picturesque Chapel Hill, NC, home of the Tar Heels of the University of North Carolina. (Well I’m not live from there, but I will be in Philly and Atlanta.)

Anyway, it’s also game one of the Pochettino Era, may it last long and be overflowing with trophies. He’s looking for players who want to work and impress from the start, and it’s plenty of new faces from the jump.

Lineups were over 20 minutes late, so we might see a delayed kick-off as well.

Here we go!

Chelsea starting lineup (4-2-3-1):
Cumming | Cucurella, Humphreys, Chalobah (c), Gusto | Santos, Casadei | Maatsen, Chukwuemeka, Moreira | Jackson

Substitutes from: everyone else

Wrexham starting XI:
Foster | O’Connell, Tozer (c), O’Connor, Forde, J.Jones, Cannon, Lee, Mendy, Dalby, Mullin

Substitutes from: Lainton, Barnett, McFadzean, Cleworth, Boyle, Hayden, Young, J.Davies, McAlinden, Palmer, Waters

Date / Time: Wednesday, July 19, 2023, 8pm EDT; 1am BST (next day); 5:30am IST (next day)
Venue: Kenan Memorial Stadium, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

On TV: ESPN, ESPN Deportes (USA); DAZN (Canada Ryan Reynoldsistan), none (UK); elsewhere
Streaming: ESPN+ (USA); Chelsea website & 5th Stand app (UK & int’l) — the official stream is set to debut a potentially pretty cool match experience, called “Match View X”, which promises to “enable fans to tailor their match-viewing experience by turning on or off graphic overlays, statistics, play-by-play match events, and real-time player tracking, or watching instant highlights of key moments”.

LIVE BLOG

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!