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The quality of the new Chelsea players cannot be doubted, but they don’t yet quite have the familiarity with each other that they need to truly flourish…
Throughout the Premier League season so far, Chelsea have been a club surrounded by question marks. There’s a plan to spend a lot of money and to invest in the long-term. That much appears clear. But exactly how this ends up manifesting itself remains half-shrouded in the distance. Many believe that the path being followed by Todd Boehly is an all or nothing strategy, which ends up either with a tonne of silverware and a raft of high-value players on long contracts, or a fire sale and downsizing.
They certainly arrived at the London Stadium in need of a lift. Three goals and one win hadn’t been a terribly good return for 2023, and for all the talk of having to retain patience with Graham Potter at Stamford Bridge, this has clearly already started to fray in some quarters. In ninth place in the Premier League table and nine points off a Champions League place, and all the spending in the world hadn’t been able to mask that.
Potter did react. Chelsea Twitter was awash with excitement at the news that Connor Gallagher and Mason Mount had been dropped and that sort of reaction to players of that calibre not being in the team is an indicator of how high expectations, at least among an apparently high proportion of Chelsea’s very online fans. Even if we don’t allow for the vast amount of spending that the club has undertaken over the last two transfer windows, this remains a club unused to being in mid-table at this point of the season.
And a trip to West Ham felt like a trickier test than it might have done a couple of weeks earlier. The Irons are starting to come to life. They they’ve made their way through to the FA Cup fifth round without conceding a goal, an impressive win at Brentford and a banana skin dodged at Derby County, and on top of this fears of impending relegation had been eased slightly by them taking four points from their previous two Premier League matches, a comfortable win against an Everton team in the final death throes of The Frank Lampard Era and a creditable draw at Newcastle. They arrived for this match in their finest fettle of the season.
Lunchtime kick-offs can be soporific affairs at times, but Chelsea came out of the traps for this one as though pre-match hairdryers had been administered, and the sprightliest of all was Joao Felix, who stepped through the middle of a broadly static West Ham central defence to score after sixteen minutes after he’d already had one goal disallowed. Six minutes after his goal, Kai Havertz had the ball in the net for a third time, their second to be called back for offside.
It was an impressive start by Chelsea but West Ham’s start had been diabolical, just as it had been throughout the early stages of their previous game at Newcastle, with a defence with the consistency of cream cheese and a midfield so uninvolved that a small flock of pigeons was at one point briefly able to settle on the pitch. But third time’s a charm, and the Havertz disallowed goal did at least finally seem to shake them awake.
Five minutes later they were level. Again, just as with Chelsea’s opener, warnings had been sounded. Michail Antonio forced a save from Kepa, when Jarrod Bowen picked him out at the near post for a flick that the goalkeeper had to block with his chest. The resulting corner came to nothing, but within a minute West Ham were level when Vladmir Coufal’s cross, made in the with the notable absence of anything substantial from Marc Cucurella, was flicked on by Bowen for Emerson Palmieri to scuff the ball over the line at the far post. Within the space of six minutes, the momentum of the game had tilted on its axis, the goals high spots of excitement in a first half which settled as it progressed.
The second half followed this familiar theme. Chelsea pressurised for a full 20 minutes, pushing West Ham back to little substantive effect. But again, they looked their most dangerous when given a chance to break. West Ham had finally broken forward leaving a gap, the birds scattering as Ben Chilwell, who’d been on the pitch just seconds, got through on the left before getting caught in two minds between cross and shot, managing neither but to force another corner from which Chelsea produced nothing. And with nine minutes to play, they had an extremely close shave when West Ham had a goal disallowed for a very narrow offside call indeed which took, of course, an age to finally be made. With a couple of minutes to play, Soucek got away with what looked like a clear handball with two minutes to play of the 90 from a shot by Conor Gallagher.
Chelsea players thought they had a penalty for handball, but VAR says no… 📺 pic.twitter.com/popnClPiUj
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) February 11, 2023
The quality of Chelsea’s raw ingredients is obvious. The pace, skill and intelligence of, to pick just two, Felix and Mykhaylo Mudryk are hardly hiding in plain sight. But the integration still feels a little bit… off. The offsides, the running into brick walls and occasional mis-placed passes were signs of players who aren’t quite familiar enough with each other just yet, and that’s hardly surprising when we consider how little time they’ve had to get to know each other. When they broke, the muscle memory kicked in, but when West Ham managed to shut them down it felt less likely that they would score the longer they retained possession.
Their quality was most evident when moving more fluidly, than when slowed to a crawl and made to fashion something. A succession of corner kicks came to nothing, with the West Ham defence able to repel without breaking into too much of a sweat. But the bright spots were numerous. The return of Reece James was a reminder of just how important a component within this unit he was prior to his injuries. Felix was a mischievous presence, all darting runs and little glances.
There’s little question that Potter still has considerable work to do. The triple substitution of Mount, Hakim Ziyech and Chilwell for Mudryk, Noni Madueke and Cucurella wasn’t conspicuously successful – if anything, the game went into a bit of a lull around this point, only really waking up with the offside non-goal – and for all their possession they didn’t create many clear opportunities which didn’t result in an offside flag going up.
There are tiny signs of improvement at both West Ham and Chelsea. West Ham are now three games unbeaten in the Premier League, and they’re still in the FA Cup and the Europa Conference League. They look too good to go down, and the previous calls for David Moyes’ head look a little foolish now. Bowen is coming back to form, likewise Rice.
Chelsea are in a similar position, but perceptions of what they should be achieving are very different. They have the raw materials. That much is clear. But the most striking irony of the afternoon was that they looked largely docile when dominating possession and very dangerous when breaking. This will take time to gel together into something more coherent, and the question now facing them is how quickly the greater cohesion and the togetherness to break down a deep defence comes, and how long the tethers of all concerned might be. On this occasion they couldn’t break down a spirited West Ham, a pattern that’s already become very familiar to Chelsea’s supporters, this season.
