Absence of the injured Eden Hazard was apparent as a substantially weakened team from Stamford Bridge again came up short in a Wembley showpieceIt was only a friendly. That’s a fact that means Pedro will be available for Saturday’s league game against Burnley despite his red card – and it’s also a useful excuse for a largely indifferent display from the Premier League champions. Arsenal may have needed a penalty shootout to win the Community Shield but Chelsea never seemed quite in the game. Quite how troubling that should be depends largely on what stage they are supposed to be at in their preparations, but there are definite causes for concern.Chelsea’s strength last season was the 3‑4‑2‑1 formation that provided...
Will Arsène Wenger give new first-team coach Jens Lehmann direct influence for a season with a Thursday-Sunday rhythm and potential ins and outs unresolved?Guardian writers’ predicted position: 6th (NB: this is not necessarily Amy Lawrence’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)Last season’s position: 5th Related: Arsène Wenger: Mesut Özil standoff could work in Arsenal’s favour Related: Transfer window 2017 – every deal in Europe's top five leagues Continue reading...
If the buying period was shorter the playing out of footballer frustrations would be over in a few days rather than dragging on all through the summerIn newspaper terms this time of year has long been known as the silly season; everyone on their holidays, very little taking place in sport or politics, nothing much to report except exaggerated human interest stories or increasingly inane speculation.In football terms that still applies. Everton made their earliest start to a season the other night and despite their entire European campaign hanging on the result against Ruzomberok it still felt like a mid-summer friendly. Ronald Koeman even excused a below-par performance by claiming you could not expect 100% from players after a mere...
Mauricio Pochettino has bucked the trend by not adding to his Tottenham squad but the rest of the top clubs have plenty of spending left in them yetAs well as this summer being remembered for the transfer window in which just about every Premier League club tried to break their own spending record, there is a good chance it will eventually be remembered for something else. To wit: the summer when no one apart from Real Madrid knew whether they had broken a transfer record or not.Take the case of Manchester United’s Romelu Lukaku, the £90m man, as the back pages have it. When Everton sold him the price was stated at £75m plus add-ons, which might have more or...
There has been much talk about strikers this summer but apart from Kylian Mbappé, exciting and emerging names are not exactly flooding the marketAccording to just about every manager interviewed on the subject, not to mention the accumulated wisdom of more than 100 years of professional football, the hardest task in the game is putting the ball into the back of the net. It often looks deceptively easy, a tap over the line here, a well-timed header there, but at the highest level you are up against organised defences and highly-trained goalkeepers. Opportunities do not normally come along that often in a game, and frequently most of the team will have been involved in some way in creating the space...