Despite relinquishing his European crown the manic German has shown masterful leadership of his squad and troubled club At 9.50pm on Tuesday Chelsea’s players gathered on the Bernabéu touchline to prepare for extra time, having just beaten Real Madrid 3-1 in their own stadium over 90 minutes: a sensational result in isolation, but with a tinge of dread now too, a sense of having run themselves to a state of exhaustion in pursuit of a retreating mirage.Rodrygo’s goal 10 minutes from the end of normal time will be remembered for Luka Modric’s sublime diagonal pass, a weird, snaking, dipping thing, like an entity from some other physical plane. But the effect of that goal on the opposition was also striking....
Pointedly left on the bench by Thomas Tuchel, the Belgian striker has rarely looked more peripheralStamford Bridge was a crisp, clear, boisterous place at kick-off in this last-16 first leg, the air crackling with a comforting midweek energy under those low white lights. And for the next 90 minutes two things happened.First up there was that unavoidable sense of wider turmoil. What a strange, fraught occasion this was for the world’s most guilelessly weaponised sport, another turn as the hot dog seller in the background of history, a bumbling tourist on the front line of world events. Continue reading...
The Chelsea manager, unlike Jürgen Klopp, does not want to lay down the law on players getting protectedThe latest update about the number of Premier League players who are vaccinated against Covid-19 shows that English football is crying out for strong leadership when it comes to getting jabs in arms.The figures are infuriating. On Monday it was revealed that 16% of top-flight players remain unvaccinated. The vaccination journey has crawled along and even now, with Omicron forcing a raft of fixture postponements, some players are still refusing to do their civic duty. The willingness to digest misinformation about the vaccine on social media remains a problem, although perhaps there will be a shift in attitudes if different rules are brought...
West Ham’s victory was richly deserved and deepened the sense that Chelsea need to refresh their approach a littleIs this a glitch? Is the system experiencing an outage? It is a temptation that is best resisted, the urge to talk about this Chelsea team as a piece of fine-point engineering, to style Thomas Tuchel as a pure systems man, poring over his data charts, banging his dials, reconfiguring the flux capacitor with a bent hairpin.But still, something is happening here. A 3-2 defeat by an excellent West Ham at the London Stadium leaves Chelsea with two wins in their last five games, their lead at the top of the table dissipated, with a sense of the same kind of drag...
Starved of creativity, Chelsea were swarmed by Manchester City’s press as Pep Guardiola beat his German rival at the fourth attemptIt’s dangerous always to elevate players in absentia, to assume that if only they had been there they would have produced a flawless game and performed absolutely to their maximum, but perhaps the biggest lesson from the clash at Stamford Bridge on Saturday was just what a good player Mason Mount is.Chelsea so far this season had been the most impressive of the title contenders because they had seemed to have such balance between attack and defence – a quality that has become increasingly rare as the financial imbalances of the modern game have led superclubs to focus on the...