Manchester United can handle Ancelotti's Chelsea - Alex Ferguson

By Zack Wilson

Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is confident that his team can cope with the experience and quality of Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Sunday.

He also believes that Carlo Ancelotti's in-form side provide different tactical challenges to those posed by other Chelsea teams in recent years.

"It's a very experienced team. Their consistency, compared to last season, has probably been a bit better under Ancelotti," Ferguson told Inside United magazine.

"He's brought in the system he used at AC Milan of the diamond in the middle of the pitch. It's hard to break down when you get into their third, because they've got bodies compacted into the central area of the pitch.

"Jose Mourinho played one up and five in the middle of the park - that also made Chelsea very difficult to beat, but in a different way to what Ancelotti is doing. Ancelotti's got the two strikers, and that is a major change compared to [Luiz Felipe] Scolari and [Claudio] Ranieri."

United lost to a stumbling Liverpool at Anfield last month, a recent memory which Ferguson insists his men will do their best to erase this weekend.

He added: "It's always a hard game at Chelsea, but we'll deal with it better than we did at Anfield, I'm sure of that. They're shaping up [to be the main challengers]. It seems they'll be the ones to get in front of."