The night football came home...and no one was in

"The ambient noise is hideous. The overall spectacle melancholic. Maybe I will get used to it. But I have not enjoyed the game, and not just because it is same old Arsenal." So tweeted Robert Peston, ITV's verbosity-prone political editor. Normally Pesto is to be found asking excruciatingly long questions to whichever stooge has been put up to front the daily No.10 press conference. But here, in the succinct confines of Twitter, he nailed it: my worst fears confirmed - football returned to stadia bereft of fans, noise or atmosphere.

As I watched with low expectation the lifeless spectacle that was the evening's first serving, Aston Villa against Sheffield United, I couldn't help feeling it was all just an experiment: some sort of exhibition by a chemicals company to test out a new type of ball, a new form of artificial grass or that it was an Under-17 practice match behind closed doors. It certainly didn't feel like a team trying to fight its way out of relegation (Villa) or one trying to clamber into fifth place (United). The sterility of a Villa Park shorn of all but essential personnel, and the awkward moment of managers Dean Smith and Chris Wilder not knowing whether to shake hands or elbow-bump at the start (sensibly, they opted for the latter), gave the fixture a surrealism. I've seen televised games before played in front of an empty stadium, but they've usually been European matches operating under crowd bans. This enforced absence was different, and not even the Sky Sports option of a crowd sound effect audio channel could make a difference.

Players taking a ten-second knee before kick-off, followed by a minute's silence for victims of COVID-19, provided two moments of theatre. But for the 90 minutes of play that followed, the only drama was referee Michael Oliver's smart watch proving to be not so smart, and failing to signal a goal when the Villa keeper Orjan Nyland fumbled Oliver Norwood's free kick over the line. Cruel for Sheffield United, but even more cruel for the football-starved viewer hoping for something more than an anodyne encounter to herald the return of competitive football after a three month absence in which we focused on other priorities. Not dying, mainly. If the failure of Oliver's watch was a major talking point in the otherwise so-so 0-0 draw then so, too, was the lack of intervention from VAR on what - regardless of the game itself - was supposed to be a prestige moment in this weird season. "We were waiting for somebody at Stockley Park to show a bit of courage and say they will make that decision," Wilder said afterwards, "but if they've not seen it and seven cameras haven't seen it I suppose they will say that it was not their decision to make." Fair point. For once, you could hardly say the crowd saw what the referee didn't.

If the Villa game was meant to be the warm-up act, the main event - Manchester City-Arsenal - hardly delivered the goods, either. Like the preceding fixture, there was plenty of effort but suspect quality. I know it's going to sound mean-spirited for me, a Chelsea fan, to pass comment on Arsenal, and do so objectively, but it's fair to say that the Gunners barely turned up to their opening engagement of Project Restart. David Luiz's brain didn't turn up at all. The Brazilian, always a subject of mixed opinion while in Chelsea blue, is yet to win over anyone in N1. After last night's performance, it's unlikely he will now. Coming on for the injured Mari after 24 minutes, it didn't take him long to let Kevin de Bruyne gift Raheem Sterling for City's opening goal. Worse was to come when he ridiculously brought down Mahrez to give away a penalty. The subsequent red card received from referee Anthony Taylor might well be the last red thing Luiz sees as an Arsenal player: his contract runs out later this month.

Luiz has inevitably provided the lightning rod for Arsenal fans' wrath, but at the end of the day, this was a clinical Pep Guardiola result for City over an team Mikel Arteta clearly has an uphill challenge to improve. That, though, is to look at the game through the myopia of normal football engagement. Widen the focals, and we had a match, like the 6pm kick-off, that resembled a pre-season friendly with less-than friendly intent. Across the park, fitness looked predictably suspect, and this actually underpins the arguments of indifference to the Premier League resuming. Playing before soulless, empty stadia is one thing, but if the season's remaining, contractually-obliged fixtures are in any way similar to these first toes dipped in the cold sea of revival, then even the most starved fans are going to go wanting.

Players often talk of crowds as being the "12th teammate", and the absence of supporters is clearly a factor. Sure, football can be played as a mechanical exercise, but last night's attempts at blowing puffs of breath into a dying season demonstrated just what a pointless exercise it really is. I've said before that the season's stumps should have just been pulled up, and we restart in September or whenever it's safe to do so, and my view hasn't been changed by last night's morsels of live 'elite' football. It might be back, warts and all, but elite quality - on this first evidence alone - is a long way away. Many will no doubt be relieved: we're all craving normality - holidays, going to the pub, not having to wear face masks to post a letter, and no one will disagree that 'normal' will come at a price, for the time being. I'm not, however, convinced that football so vacant of atmosphere is the normal we want.

Sarri seems to be the hardest word

The expected response, when asked by one's other half when walking through the door after a victorious Saturday afternoon's football watching, is to grin inanely and be largely effervescent. But that’s just not the football fan. Sometimes we just cannot be satisfied. Thus, the other Saturday, my ever-loving girlfriend was met with a distinct "meh” when I showed up after Chelsea's 2-1 win over Newcastle United.

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...

Chelsea - the loan arranger

Like chronically untogether husbands raiding petrol station gift shops on Christmas Eve, the Premier League's clubs concluded their summer transfer business on Wednesday night. Some, like the smart shoppers who get their festive acquisitions done in July, will be well on the way to integrating their purchases. Others - and I gladly single out my own Chelsea here - will still be trying to figure out what actually happened on the final day of the window and where they go from here.

I was promising myself not to go into another rant about Chelsea's transfer policy, but it's a tide I'm struggling to hold back. Because as amusing as it was to hear on Tuesday that the club was actually putting in a bid for the clown prince of central defenders, David Luiz, whom Chelsea had cheekily offloaded to PSG for an eye-watering £50 million (a transaction akin to exchanging a cow for magic beans), the reality of seeing him smirk his way through St. Pancras on Wednesday evening was something else.

For all the praise Chelsea rightfully earned when they "did their business early" in snapping up Diego Costa and Cesc Fàbregas fresh off Spain's early exit from the 2014 World Cup, the derision at last summer's window-closing trolley dash was fully justified: having been turned down by Everton for John Stones, Chelsea squeaked in with the last-minute purchases of Senegalese defender Papy Djilobodji and Reading's Jamaican central half Michael Hector...who was promptly loaned back to Reading.

The July signings of Belgian striker Michy Batshuayi (£33 million from Marseille) and N'Golo Kante from Leicester City for £30 million showed early promise. But then? Nothing. Until Marcos Alonso was brought in on Wednesday to provide left back cover, and the baffling re-signing of Luiz, all the movement from Stamford Bridge was outbound.

The chant, usually levelled at referees, of "you don't know what you're doing!" could so easily be applicable to Chelsea's player acquisitions department, especially as last season, for all the incoming traffic, there were at one point 36 players out on loan. This season they've gone two better with 38. That's thirty-eight. Three entire teams, plus five subs which are deemed surplus to requirements and/or in need of extra "development", if development is actually what they'll receive at Vitesse Arnhem, Chelsea's "sister club" in the Dutch Eredivisie. And don't forget, these 38 are on top of the 'development squad' that will remain at Cobham, forming the Under 17, Under 18, Under 19 and Under 21 teams.

It makes you wonder what was going through the club when these 38 loanees were being signed. What was the strategy for Juan Cuadrado, who's been pinging around Italy like a loose pinball ever since the club "had" to buy him from Fiorentina in 2015 (and is now back at Juventus on loan)? Or Bertrand Traore, one of the more promising youngsters last season, and who is now at Ajax, on loan? And what of prospects like Tammy Abraham (on loan at Bristol City), Nathan Ake (Bournemouth), Christian Atsu (Newcastle), Baba Rahman (the other defender bought last summer and now on loan at Schalke), Lucas Piazon (Fulham)  Lewis Baker (Arnhem), Patrick Bamford (Burnley), Jamal Blackman (Wycombe), Izzie Brown (Rotherham), Andreas Christensen (Monchengladbach), Jake Clarke-Salter (Bristol Rovers), Tomas Kalas (Fulham), Kenedy (Watford) Matt Miazga (Vitesse Arnhem) - all of whom have been feted or have tasted glimpses of first team football?

18 of this season's loanees are under the age of 21, with just 35 first team appearances between them, so it could be argued that these are young talents in need of frontline football. But with 38 in total playing elsewhere, you can't help feeling what a complete waste of talent and expectation.

Of course, no club can sustain a large squad, and as Mourinho himself has demonstrated at Manchester United, you sometimes have to be ruthless in deciding who you want, and freeing up the rest. And Chelsea aren't alone in the loaning business - Manchester City have 17 out on loan this season, Liverpool 12, West Ham 11, Tottenham seven and Arsenal and Manchester United both six.

But for Chelsea, it just looks like a transfer strategy one awry. Even with Antonio Conte coming in with a clear view of whom he wants, if David Luiz is the solution, the problem is bigger than we may have thought.