Those of you who follow my posts regularly will know that the club on which I have probably been harshest is Chelsea. This is understandable, given their recent combination of a lack of performance on the field and complete mismanagement off it. Thus, there has been much to criticize about the Blues over the last few years.
This is why what I'm about to write may come as a surprise to some of you: this Chelsea team actually looks pretty good.
In their recent Champions League match against Ajax, the London club came back from a 4-1 deficit to gut out a 4-4 draw. Substitute Reece James scored the tying goal in the 74th minute to earn Chelsea an unlikely share of the points.
At the beginning of this season, if someone had told me that in the first week of November, Chelsea would be in second place in a Champions League group containing Ajax, Valencia, and Lille while also riding a lengthy winning streak in the Premier League to put daylight between themselves and other clubs chasing a top-four spot, I would not have believed that person. Yet, it is what it is - Chelsea look like a rejuvenated team.
So just how have they turned it around after a turbulent and largely unsuccessful past few years?
I'll start with the obvious reason: they wasted no time in transitioning from the Eden Hazard era to what I believe will be the Christian Pulisic era. Pulisic has received tremendous amounts of hype, and rightly so - his ceiling is one which very few players can ever hope to approach. Still only 21 years old, the American winger is likely to be the centrepiece of this Chelsea team for at least the next four or five years. He projects to become the type of player around whom, when he reaches his prime years, a Champions League title contender can be built. Of course, the onus is on Roman Abramovich and the rest of Chelsea's front office to ensure that Pulisic's prime is not wasted in the same way that Hazard's were.
Chelsea head coach Frank Lampard has also begun to get a better feel of his new position. When he took over in the dugout for the club at which he spent 13 years as a player, some eyebrows were raised because up to that point, he had not experienced much coaching success. Chelsea's slow start to the season did little to dispel these doubts. However, over the last few weeks, he has clearly begun to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this team much more and has thus been able to tailor the team's tactics to suit them - something his predecessor Maurizio Sarri was never quite able to do.
Chelsea have also benefited from breakout seasons by some of their previously unheralded players. The likes of Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, and Fikayo Tomori were not on the radars of most fans prior to this season, while Willian, Jorginho, and Kurt Zouma, among others, are playing arguably the best football of their career to date. This doesn't even account for the fact that the club's best player, defensive midfielder N'Golo Kanté, has missed most of the season thus far due to injuries.
After Hazard's departure to Real Madrid as well as the transfer ban which had been imposed on Chelsea, many expected Chelsea to have to suffer through something of a "lost season". However, they have certainly outperformed expectations up to this point of the season. What's more, when the woes of fellow London clubs Arsenal and Tottenham are taken into account, it can be seen that Chelsea have clearly re-established themselves as the best of the city's three major teams.
Now, I won't get carried away here - Chelsea's best-case scenario this season, in my opinion, is third place in the Premier League, an FA Cup victory, and a Champions League run to the quarterfinals. That being said, the set of results which have just been mentioned, while still rather unlikely, no longer appears as radically unrealistic as it did just two months ago.
At the start of the season, not many expected this team to gel the way that it has, but somehow, for the first time in a very long time, whatever Chelsea are doing seems to be working.
No comments:
Post a Comment