The club’s owners must see that a fascination with celebrity and glamour is no way to build the systems that make a team tickIt has not been entirely easy as the Premier League has got going again to pick up the threads. Is that manager still on the brink? Are they in crisis or resurgent? Who’s that bloke with the beard again? Perhaps most disconcerting of all was the way Chelsea swept into a 2-0 lead against Bournemouth inside 24 minutes. Weren’t they supposed to be faltering? Wasn’t there dark grumbling about Graham Potter? Hadn’t they slipped eight points off fourth?And then Reece James, in his first game back after the knee injury that has kept him out since early...
Chelsea will continue to look vulnerable until the new manager solves their deep-seated issues and his ideas have taken rootThiago Silva paused with the ball on the halfway line. Alongside him, his teammates were pointing and shouting at him to do something with it. Up in the stands, the various strands of encouraging advice being proffered by Chelsea fans had essentially congealed into a single unintelligible noise – something like faacckkinggettrrrrid, if we were going to try and transcribe it. And so it was that in the final minute of injury time, with Chelsea rousing themselves in search of a late equaliser, their chosen tactic was to pump a high ball up to the 5ft 7in Raheem Sterling.As it happened,...
Injury crisis is exposing a lack of co-ordinated recruitment for a manager whose success has come on a budgetImagine you are Graham Potter. You consider Arsenal’s probable team to face your Chelsea side today. You look at Mikel Arteta’s front three. You are not sure who will play on the right but even with Ben Chilwell injured again you have Mark Cucurella to play on that side of the defence as well as the option of a more attacking wing-back. Then you look at the other flank, where Gabriel Martinelli has been in sensational form. You remember how he embarrassed Emerson Royal and unsettled Trent Alexander-Arnold, how his pace and directness have troubled teams all season. With Reece James out,...
Using Sterling and Pulisic as wing-backs is not without risk but it makes the team less predictable and is fun when it clicksCallum Hudson-Odoi never really enjoyed playing as a right wing-back. He tried his best when Thomas Tuchel put him there after becoming Chelsea’s head coach in January 2021 but the role never felt a natural fit. “At times, it was OK,” Hudson-Odoi said in an interview with the Athletic this week. “But sometimes in my head I’m thinking: ‘What am I doing, why am I in this position? I’m more defending than attacking.’”All that running towards his own goal took a toll on Hudson-Odoi, cramping the winger’s style, and the result was his departure from Chelsea in August....
Against Chelsea, the Brazilian, Bruno Fernandes and Christian Eriksen looked like a slick, modern and fully functional unitAnd you can sit there all night, playing with your silly machines. By the end of this taut and thrilling match, the iPads and the tactics boards had been stashed away. Graham Potter and Erik ten Hag stood on the touchline, contemplating this 1-1 draw, looking drained and perhaps even a little concussed by the experience. It had been a game of stratagems and counter-stratagems, plans made and then remade, two coaches trying to control the space on the pitch with the space in their heads. But ultimately this is also a contact sport, a thing of guts and loins, of inches and...