New Year, new thinking, old problem

Picture: Sky Sports

So I start 2023 with a post about football. Sorry if you were expecting something erudite about rock and roll, but there’s plenty of that in the pipeline, I assure you. It’s just that things need to be said about my football club. And being a Monday, home of the occasional ‘Monday Moan’ (see posts passim), it might as well be now, even if today is only the second day of the new year.

There was hope that the World Cup, which ate through most of the final six weeks of the old year, would allow Graham Potter time to figure out what wasn’t happening at Chelsea. Prior to last Tuesday’s restorative 2-0 win over Bournemouth, the club had suffered three straight defeats in its previous Premier League outings, running up to the tournament in Qatar. Potter had said that he would use the international break to get his head around why. In fairness, it was probably the first opportunity he’d had to fully get under the skin of the team he’d been somewhat parachuted into following Thomas Tuchel’s abrupt sacking in September, barely a month into the new season. That meant Potter had a steep curve to attain, even if it was softened by conciliatory noises from Chelsea’s new owners about a “project” that would give him time. 

The Bournemouth result, which saw goals from Kai Havertz and Mason Mount, with Raheem Sterling displaying a contributory form that he’d barely shown since his summer move from Manchester City, gave some hope that Potter’s pledge before the game, that improvement was coming, would ring true. “We’ve had a challenging time, some ups, some downs, in terms of the previous year which is normal at any football club,” the head coach said during his pre-match comments. “But we want to stabilise, try and improve and make our supporters happy, because we know the last few weeks before the break weren’t nice for us. Results suffered, performances weren’t where we wanted them to be, and we have to do better than that.”

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

The one negative in the Bournemouth result was the withdrawal of Reece James having put in a half during which he’d demonstrated, cruelly, what Chelsea had been missing during his absence due to a knee injury. When that injury occurred again, right in front of the dugout, a collective groan extended around Stamford Bridge. That was just how much difference James had made. If, then, you add his left-sided wingback counterpart Ben Chilwell to the injury list, a picture emerges of why Chelsea have looked pedestrian without the pair, marauding forward to cut in, or providing flank protection to a central defensive trio that includes the 38-year-old Thiago Silva. It’s worth noting that since the start of last season Chelsea have won 82% of the games James and Chilwell have started together, and lost just once. Given that both players have been injured for varying periods of that record, you have to wonder what could have been with them fully intact.

So, move on a few days to yesterday’s New Year’s Day visit to second-from-bottom Nottingham Forest, whose manager Steve Cooper knew exactly where to exploit weakness. The resulting 1-1 scoreline flattered Chelsea with, perhaps, the one bright spot being Raheem Sterling’s long overdue sixth goal out of 17 appearances. Full credit, then, to Cooper for inspiring his side into not lying down. But questions must be asked as to why Potter was unable to eek another three points out of a squad in which the club’s new owners invested an additional £270 million last summer. Word is there’s even more expenditure to come. Money, as we all know, doesn’t necessarily solve problems. 

“I think Potter needs time,” was the conclusion of Graeme Souness after the Forest game. “This is not a squad equipped to go and win big games of football. Their goal difference is plus-two.”. Which raises the obvious question: if not, what does £270 million buy you, then? Not a lot, it would seem. None of Chelsea’s summer purchases have exactly set the world alight.

What is emerging are doubts about co-owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali’s buying strategy, which has appeared more urgent largesse than tactical solution finding. £170 million of that spend went on defenders. By any measure of expectation, Kalidou Koulibaly (a £33 million buy from Napoli), Marc Cucurella (£56 million from Brighton) and Wesley Fofana (almost £70 million from Leicester - and has only made six appearances due to injury), should have made some difference. But, it would seem, no. Koulibaly was meant to resolve the departures of Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen, both of whose contracts had run down amid dissatisfaction with successive managers, and then exploited the vacuum caused by Roman Abramovich’s forced disposal of the club.

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

Against Forest, Chelsea were exposed at the back. Playing a four, with Koulibaly and Silva flanked by club captain César Azpilicueta and Cucurella, Chelsea looked leaden through the middle, with Jorginho labouring despite loanee Denis Zakaria putting in a decent shift. As wingbacks, Azpiliqueta and Cucurella are no substitutes for James and Chilwell, either in terms of guile or agility. Which means more is expected from the midfield. But here questions must be asked about Jorginho’s viability. In turn, the forward line of Pulisic, Havertz and Sterling look somewhat anaemic, with the American blowing hot and cold (frustratingly, he was outstanding for the USA in Qatar) and the German still unsure of whether he is a false 9 or an actual 9. Hakim Zyech doesn’t seem to have Potter’s confidence as a starting option, despite an outstanding appearance for Morocco at the World Cup. That seemed to merely confirm that he wanted to remain in the shop window, because God knows he hasn’t appeared to be interested in playing for his club when he’s been given the chance.

What this all ladders up to is that Chelsea are, after all that outlay, lacking from front to back. Even if you factor in a lengthening injury list that includes N’Golo Kanté (who surely must be reaching the end of his contract and usefulness, anyway, given that he spends more time on the treatment table these days than a football pitch), the project must surely be about a wholesale blood transfusion rather than more purchases which essentially paper over cracks that have existed in the plasterwork for a long time. 

As one Twitter wag noted yesterday after the draw with Forest, Chelsea have burned through Antonio Conte, Maurizio Sarri, club legend Frank Lampard and Tuchel as managers in the last six years, but some of the same players that engendered their sacking are still on the books. A harsh assessment maybe, but it is perhaps why the appointment of RB Leipzig’s Christopher Vivell as technical director could be the most important signing of the Boehly era (replacing the American chairman himself who’d been fulfilling the role ad-interim). 

Maybe that will stem the apparently naive acquisitions of players like striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, bought in an act of transfer deadline day desperation, presumably in the belief that he could reconnect with former Borussia Dortmund manager Tuchel, only for the coach to be fired five days later. In fairness, Chelsea have been staffing up behind the scenes under the new ownership, especially within its much-vaunted academy, but the attention - and expectation - will always fall on the first team.

And so, we enter another January window. Received wisdom is that player signings at this time of year smack of shotgun wedding, and often end in disappointment (case in point: Fernando Torres). So far, the club has brought in 20-year-old Ivorian striker David Datro Fofana to cover for Armando Broca’s long-term injury, and central defender Benoît Badiashile has joined from Monaco for around £32 million. As is now the custom, Chelsea are being linked with just about every other player who performed with distinction at the World Cup in the belief that the Boehly-Clearlake chequebook contains endless blank pages.

This does bring the spotlight back to Graham Potter. Whether he gets time remains to be seen, but compared to his predecessors, the threat of a P45 isn’t as immediate under the new owners as they had been under Abramovich. But even that doesn’t insulate him. Potter’s challenge - which he hitherto hasn’t encountered in his managerial career - is to turn a squad that still contains Champions League-winning players from only May 2021 back into Top Four competitors. Which on yesterday’s evidence and today’s view of the Premier League table, in which Chelsea sit eighth, seems unlikely.

The impending period will, though, pile on the pressure. Potter’s next two games are against Manchester City - the first, at home in the league, the second, three days later, at the Etihad in the FA Cup. There’s little respite beyond that, either, with a trip down the Fulham Road to upbeat neighbours at Craven Cottage, before returning to Stamford Bridge for Crystal Palace, and then back on the road to Anfield, all before the January window shuts. No wonder fans are anxious. Some have become openly hostile to Potter, though these tend to be keyboard gobshites offering little more than Mauricio Pochettino’s name as an alternative, and who patently haven’t read the situation that the Chelsea coach found himself in when he drove up the A23 from Brighton to his new job in September.

Fresh blood might help - sorry, fresh blood should help - but the bottom line is that Chelsea have too many players who are, to varying degrees, underperforming in seemingly untouchable positions. Some might be doing so because of the players around them, while with others it’s because they simply lack the winning mentality required at the club. 

It’s often said that Chelsea have never been as good as the team that won trophies repeatedly under José Mourinho with a spine of serial winners - and leaders - that ran from goal (Petr Čech), through central defence (John Terry), central midfield (Lampard) to the front (Didier Drogba). The club has, of course, won silverware since that quartet’s retirements, but in its current line-up, it’s hard to identify where the strengths are. Capabilities are there, no doubt, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Chelsea are currently a collection of individuals. But there’s something patently missing.

It doesn’t need to be found immediately, though. A period of purdah from open-top buses might allow the club to re-establish the imperiousness of the early Abramovich era, and the success that had eluded it in the preceding 34 years. The trouble is, success is a very demanding mistress. And a lucrative one, too. Which might tip the weight of expectation on Graham Potter’s shoulders against him in the months ahead.

With 20/20 hindsight...

I'm not going to rewrite my own history. Frank Lampard's removal in January still hurts (see posts passim). But what Thomas Tuchel produced on Saturday in Porto, out of the same group of players who’d started the season under Lampard, was a tactical masterclass. The result, a 17th major trophy - and for the second time, Europe’s most prestigious - under Roman Abramovich’s ownership suggests that the philosophy of silverware over managerial longevity works. 

To those of a principled nature, this apparently mercenary need for cups might sit uncomfortably with a more purist, romantic view of football. But Saturday’s win over the even more lavishly resourced Manchester City, whose owner even paid for the club’s fans to be flown to and from Portugal, revealed something of the notion that it’s not always about money. That might sound rich from the fan of a club where money has, actually, bought quite a lot. But money didn’t buy that victory - directly - it was Tuchel’s tactics, plus Pep Guardiola’s decision not to play start with Fernandinho and Rodri, and add a little bit of free stardust from the Chelsea Academy. 

One genuinely satisfying outcome of the Champions League Final was the sight of Mason Mount and Reece James making such outstanding contributions to the win - the former with his midfield-splitting pass to Kai Havertz for the goal, the latter for his robust maturity in preventing City’s fearsome attack from clawing back. You could also cite Andreas Christensen and Christian Pulisic, both of whom have experience of Chelsea’s youth system. Havertz’s goal was most satisfying, simply because the £71 million signing had taken a while to settle in the side since his arrival last summer, with a huge price tag on his shoulders. A nasty bout of COVID-19 didn’t help, either. Perplexingly, he’s still not the out-and-out forward Chelsea so desperately need. 

Timo Werner, bless him, once again demonstrated how a full season and the injection of a fellow German to manage him still hasn’t done anything to improve his finishing. A return of 12 goals in 51 games (and just two in 23) over all competitions is by any measure woeful for a striker, especially one who arrived from Leipzig last summer, having bagged 28 strikes out of 34 Bundesliga games alone. So with the sadly outcast Tammy Abraham - another youth product - and Olivier Giroud destined for pastures new, if Chelsea are to close the gap with City in the Premier League, Werner either needs to dramatically improve his lethality, or Mr. Abramovich has to get his cheque book out again.

The youth element of Chelsea’s make-up has been the core of the club narrative over the last two seasons. When Frank Lampard took over, he had little option but to play the youngsters, thanks to the UEFA transfer ban in place. His existing familiarity with players like Mount, as well as the history of assistants Joe Edwards and Jody Morris working with the Academy, meant their progression added chapters to the fairy tale. And thus it continued when Tuchel took over, though he fell back on experience and maturity to begin with, probably as a safety net, before increasingly seeing what Mount and James could do. The same applied to Ben Chilwell, who’d joined from Leicester last summer, but seemed to take a while to win the new coach over, with the unreliable (in my opinion) Marcos Alonso getting the nod over him. 

It would, however, be too easy to make Saturday night’s victory a romantic one about youngsters alone: just look at the shift the near-32-year-old captain César Azpilicueta put in, or the 36-year-old Thiago Silva, before his groin gave out, or even Antonio Rüdiger. And just how magnificent was the diminutive N’Golo Kanté, who turned 30 in March, placing him in the category of players Chelsea likes to offer limited-length contracts from now on (but would be utterly insane not to tie him down, based on the form he’s shown this season). Kanté was everywhere against City, and while it’s become something of a cliche to refer to him as two players in one, he was, once more, more than just a holding player, but frequently the origin of Chelsea’s forward runs, attacks that exposed Guardiola’s midfield folly.

Here, then, is where I run the risk of revisionism. Chelsea were in some trouble in January when Lampard - forever a club legend - was fired. It’s possible that they could have dug themselves out of it, but heads had noticeably dropped. I still can’t reconcile my thoughts: could Frank have benefitted from a more experienced director of football to manage him? Or was it just too soon, ultimately, to be managing the club? John Terry beware, if so. 

Thomas Tuchel is not naive. He will know full well of the managerial toll that has come with the successes of the Abramovich era. Saturday’s result was the third occasion Chelsea have won a title at the end of a season where the manager has changed midway through. Maybe the Russian owner knows what he's doing, after all. His instincts for pulling the trigger at the right time seem uncannily sharp, but it’s hard not to wonder why those instincts weren’t apparent when some appointments were made in the first place. Avram Grant, André Villas-Boas, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Maurizio Sarri, even José Mourinho (twice)  and Lampard himself were all, to some extent, experiments that failed, requiring Guus Hiddink or the detested (but successful) Rafa Benítez to be parachuted in. 

Tuchel took over an increasingly listless team, instilled some defensive fortitude into them and plugged the leaks. It’s likely that he will now be offered to extend his somewhat tentative 18-month contract. If nothing else earns it, the ‘cup with the big ears’ should do so (not that Chelsea winning it helped Roberto Di Matteo - appointed in March 2012, fired the following November). Tuchel’s tactical victory on Saturday over Guardiola has, at least, quelled the disquiet over Chelsea’s end to the domestic season, with their only-just fourth place in the Premier League, having lost games at crucial moments, and Leicester’s convincing victory in the FA Cup Final which denied Tuchel his only other chance of securing silver.

But taken into another context, along the way, Tuchel has now outsmarted Guardiola three times in six weeks, which poses the enticing prospect of Chelsea mounting a credible challenge to City next term. In the Premier League, Tuchel arrested any further decline and pushed Chelsea back into European contention, just. He took them into an FA Cup Final. And - most impressively - he masterminded superb knockout-round victories over Atlético Madrid, Saturday night’s hosts, Porto, Real Madrid and then City. It’s not been lost on commentators that the near-deity Pep Guardiola’s desire to win Europe’s biggest prize continues, while Thomas Tuchel has achieved it in only five months. He’s not the Special One, but on Saturday’s evidence, he is pretty special. Wish I’d known that when I wagged the finger of doom in January and said that Chelsea should be careful what they wished for. I mean, what do I know?

You can't win anything with kids

It is, of course, too soon to make even an educated guess as to how the 2019-2020 football season will ultimately pan out for anyone, let alone Chelsea, whose competitive record since the season began currently stands at Played 6, Won 2, Drawn 3, Lost 1 with not a clean sheet between them. But at risk of putting an over-positive spin on things, such a capricious start to Frank Lampard's tenure as the club's head coach belies what will no doubt become the core narrative of the Blues' season to come: kids.

Now, the likes of Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Christian Pulisic, plus Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, when they are released from injury, are hardly children, at ages ranging from 18 to 23. But in the recent history of Chelsea Football Club, that Abraham is currently the Premier League's top scorer, that Mason Mount has just made his senior England debut, and on Saturday Tomori scored an early contender for goal of the season, is testament to the undoubted sprinkling of youthful stardust that has transformed the mood around the club like stormy weather and overcast skies being replaced by bright sunshine and a cloud-free vista. The football is still capricious: Saturday's 5-2 win over Wolves is not without the recognition that Chelsea still couldn't keep a clean sheet, despite Abraham breaking Eden Hazard's record for becoming the youngest Chelsea player to score a league hat-trick as well as becoming the first English player to score three for Chelsea since Lampard himself eight years ago.

There are more milestones to come, more records to be broken. The 11 league goals scored so far between Abraham, Mount and Tomori, five games in, have already beaten the previous best record of academy graduates (six scored by just Loftus-Cheek in the entire 2018-19 season), marking a first since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. That, alone, is a telling set of stats, even if they are a reflection of the situation the club finds itself in, unable to do the thing they've done most seasons under the Russian oligarch's ownership, and simply gone out and bought players. Thanks to the two-window FIFA transfer ban, the youngsters are getting match time that would have never been possible under any of Lampard's predecessors, a frustration that first found oxygen under José Mourinho, but manifested itself more prevalently under the progressively petulant reign of Antonio Conte, and more dangerously, under the stubborn Maurizio Sarri, whose eventual inclusion of Hudson-Odoi and Loftus-Cheek came across as something he was coerced into.

We have been there before, of course. The promise of youngsters like Jon Harley, Ryan Bertrand, Josh McEachran and Nathan Aké, joining Chelsea Academy alumni like Venables, Greaves, Bonetti, Osgood, Harris and, latterly, Terry, in breaking through into the senior squad and on to greatness is a well-wrought saga. To date, only John Terry in the club's modern era has gone on to see out his career at the club he joined as a schoolboy. That, though, is the romantic view of youth. Football is a serious business, not a careers advisory service, so the expectation of Academy products breaking into the senior team has been somewhat naive in the era of mega-money transfers for players from the European and South American elites. Even when the Chelsea youth squads train in a separate part of the club's Cobham training ground as the senior team, it has often sounded like they could be in a separate part of the country, for all the good it's offered (some weeks back the Daily Telegraph reported that Sarri didn't watch a single youth training session or attend any under-23 games during his year in charge, and once remained in his Cobham office while a critical youth championship game was going on barely 50 yards away).

Lampard's appointment as head coach in July may have appeared like a compromise, in the absence/reluctance of more experienced candidates for the job, but his open embrace of youth, which has already seen Academy players taking part in senior squad training sessions, is bringing a degree of feelgood back to the club. Even if defence continues to be a major worry, the goals-per-game from Abraham in particular is a genuine cause for celebration, even if the reality is that Chelsea this season are not expected to end it that high up the Premier League table, or progress in the Champions League, a campaign which commences tomorrow night against Valencia. But there is an acceptance - for now - that this will be a fallow year that, unless things go dramatically badly, will have us see homegrown talent putting smiles on faces at Stamford Bridge, something that was absent for much of last season and patches of the previous one.

Even more pleasing is that in these first few weeks youngsters have been going some way to entertainingly disprove Alan Hansen's infamous remark on Match Of The Day that "you can't win anything with kids" after Sir Alex Ferguson's then-young Manchester United side lost 3-1 to Aston Villa on the opening day of the 1995-96 season. United later went on to do the League and Cup double with that very same team, one whose average age was 26 years and 137 days. Curiously, only Chelsea has since won the league title with a younger squad - a side in 2005 featuring Lampard himself, Terry and Joe Cole with an average age of 25 years and 312 days. Perhaps you can win things with kids. Time, this season at Chelsea, will only tell.