Because, apart from a couple of well taken goals from Pedro and Willian, there wasn’t much else to enthuse about. Which sounds bitter, I know. We won, they didn’t. However, it's not about being greedy, about being the spoilt fan of a monied, so-called "elite" club. It is about why things just don’t feel right at Chelsea at the moment. Fast forward, then, to the aftermath of last Saturday's appointment at the Emirates. A keenly poised fixture, if ever there was one - a London derby, fifth hosting fourth, two managers in their first terms trying to change things around, and so on.
"I have to say that I'm extremely angry, very angry indeed," was the quote of the game, and it came not from an exasperated fan, or the Arsenal had coach, Unai Emery, a man still trying to win over a section of the Arsenal faithful. No, it was Chelsea's Maurizio Sarri, smarting - and then some - from a 2-0 defeat, a defeat he attributed "...to our mentality more than anything else, our mental approach. We played against a team which mentally was far more determined than we were. And this is something I can't accept."
This has been a theme creeping into Sarri's assessment of his side in recent weeks. Despite resolutely maintaining fourth place in the Premier League, Chelsea's performances have grown frustratingly limp, with fans and football writers listing an ever-growing litany of complaints: Eden Hazard being played somewhat ineffectively as a 'false 9'; N'Golo Kanté being pushed into the right of midfield rather than the holding position in which he won league titles with both Leicester and Chelsea; Jorginho, Sarri's trusted on-field lieutenant at Napoli, being given the holding position as a fulcrum role, and not quite pulling it off; senior club players like Willian and Pedro blowing hot and cold, and Marcos Alonso defending like he just can’t be bothered any more; and then there’s the slavish obedience to Sarri's possession obsession, resulting in defenders and even a supposedly attack-minded midfielder like Ross Barkley engaging in tippy-tappy triangles that rarely break over the half-way line. Sometimes it’s been habitually wayward David Luiz who, to his credit, has suggested a "sod this!" attitude and come bombing forward to loft a ball into one of the attacking midfielders (itself a noteworthy statement, given the lack of a prolific striker in the ranks).
This might sound like a reappearance of my Monday Moan, so named during José Mourinho's final months at Chelsea when, from the opening game of the 2015-16 season until his dismissal the following December, Chelsea were stubbornly frustrating week in, week out, and it was impossible not to rant on a Monday morning while angrily travelling to work. With Sarri, things haven’t got that bad: with Mourinho, Chelsea, with largely the same players, slumped from League champions to at risk of relegation in an alarming four months. That’s not at risk at the moment, which suggests that this is a matter of relativity. For the manager to be blaming his players' mentality is surely a reflection on him as a coach? He and his staff train the players and motivate them, sending them out to do battle with self-belief and a plan. But from the stand or from the sofa, Chelsea's players seem to be lacking both or at least a Plan B.
The prospect of Gonzalo Higuain arriving in the next few days to replace the [hopefully] outbound and moribund Alvaro Morata will hopefully be more than a sticking plaster to heal an annoying but not fatal cut. If any player has demonstrated a poor mentality, to use Sarri's words, it’s been Morata who, even after scoring has looked more in need of a phone call to The Samaritans than the traditional group hug from his team mates. Funny, he's never looked quite right at Chelsea, and that ridiculous £60 million fee probably didn’t help. Higuain has, at least, a relationship with Sarri, and in being a proper centre forward, and one with muscle, too, he might go some way to restore the attacking approach that worked so well when Diego Costa was marauding defenders and goalkeepers. We shouldn’t get too carried away, though. Higuain will not be a silver bullet. Balls will still need to get to him, which means that if Chelsea's defenders are still dicking about, passing to each other as if still warming up for a training session at Cobham, Higuain will soon get tired of waiting.
Sarri, however, is certainly not convinced that Higuain is the answer, and his increasingly tetchy rhetoric is the kind we’ve heard before from Chelsea managers...and it usually doesn’t end well. "The club knows what I want, I’m sure they are doing their best," he told Sky Italia at the weekend. There’s no suggestion that this was a dig at the club, but the fact he has had to mention the club's prime role in player acquisition several times has been more than a defensive move. "But, he added, "whoever arrives will have difficulties with the mentality of today." Again with the mentality thing.
During his explosive post-match presser on Saturday, Sarri commented on how his players were "extremely difficult" to motivate and cannot be changed. A quite bizarre admission when you think about it. This is a team that went 12 games unbeaten and, even if they’ve lost four of the 11 games that have followed that run, shouldn’t be lacking the urge to win more. Sarri is not Antonio Conte, whose tough training regime from the beginning threatened to exhaust his players, nor Mourinho, whose Mourinho-ness led to “palpable discord”. No, Sarri is a man who, despite the absence of trophies in his managerial career (a career that includes a large period coaching in the lower leagues of Tuscany before anything more senior in Italy) was appointed to manage one of the top teams in the Premier League, barely three weeks before his first competitive game, and who has had to go from a standing start at a club with a notoriously low tolerance of failure. So we should cut him some slack. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that his obstinate possession approach and reluctance to make changes in a game until it's almost too late (a trait he he shares with his compatriot predecessor) means that if it ain’t working, it continues so. This, in turn, leads to players getting frustrated, which leads to players effectively downing tools.
It’s been pointed out frequently recently, in context of Chelsea’s performances, that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Watching Ross Barkley, a player you used to think had a bit of grit about him, inside the Chelsea half with his back to the Newcastle goal and repeatedly exchanging short passes with Luiz and Alonso, was certainly maddening. After 34 competitive games so far this season, it would be nice to think that even the players had grown tired of this repetitive madness. We remain to be comvinced they have.
If, as Sarri suggests, the problem is more mental than tactical, then the responsibility is still his to change things. "We played against a team [Arsenal] which mentally was far more determined than we were. And this is something I can't accept," he said on Saturday. "We had a similar issue in the league game at Tottenham. We spoke a great deal about that loss and our approach at the time, and I spoke to the players, and I thought we'd overcome this issue. But it appears we still have this issue and we still seem to lack sufficient motivation and being mentally solid and our determination. So I'm not happy, I'm really not happy." Significantly, Chelsea's next opponent are Spurs, in the EFL Trophy semi-final second leg on Thursday, a tie in which the Blues trail by a single goal. Having the manager talk about "a group of players [that] are extremely difficult to motivate" ahead of a sensitive tie with Chelsea's old foe is extremely worrying, even if his comments were intended to get under those players' skins. To give Sarri some credit, he wasn’t throwing his players completely under a bus with his comments. "But I couldn’t possibly say I am not responsible as well, in part at least, for the mental approach. That's something we have to share," he said during the presser. But he also highlighted his team's lack of ruthlessness, especially in the final third, a statement hinting at the value of bringing in a forward like Higuain.
Using a press conference to fire up underperforming players is a notoriously risky business. Many will have preferred Sarri to kept his comments to the team conference room at Cobham. "It's a huge, huge gamble from Sarri's point of view," said Rio Ferdinand on BT Sport after the Arsenal game. "He's looking for a response and rightly so. [But] doing it publicly in a presser after a game, it's questionable because these players have been through this with a couple of managers, and the managers get gone." Certainly his rant revealed some home truths. "A player at this level can't be afraid to face up to their responsibilities, or coming to speak to the coach about issues or mistakes they've made," he said. "If they were afraid of that, they shouldn't be playing at this level in the first place. The players and I talk very openly about what's happening. I'm the person responsible for the team, of course. So that means we have to discuss issues, and it's important my players have the attitude I'm asking them to have. If they don't have that, they shouldn't be playing at this level." Which could also be interpreted as a dig at the Chelsea board who bought the players.
I had no real view on Sarri when Chelsea appointed the Italian in the summer. The consensus was that he must have been doing something right at Napoli if they were only trailing Juventus by reasons of the Turin juggernaut's relentless dominance of Serie A. We read Sarri's somewhat fairytale backstory, that he’d given up a career as a commodities broker to coach in Tuscany. And yet here he was, being appointed by Roman Abramovich, a man with exacting standards of expectation, who even fired a manager as genial and as successful as Carlo Ancelotti for not quite matching the league-and-cup double of his first season in charge. Sarri seemed like a gamble, but one thing we Chelsea fans have learned from the managerial hire-and-fire merry-go-round is that in Roman we trust (though last summer he was somewhat distracted by visa wrangles with the British government). Having a go, publically, at players is hardly a last roll of the dice. But unless something - a change of tactics, a detonation of motivation under the players, fresh blood...something - comes along, questions about Sarri's longevity will be inevitable. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the "What if?" conversation has already cropped up during Chelsea board meetings. Because when discord becomes palpable, there is usually only one outcome...
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