Chelsea thrashed Wolves in style - but one huge weakness is still there to be ruthlessly exploited
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On the face of it, Chelsea’s 6-2 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday was a brilliant result – a barrage of goals generated by a couple of brilliant individual performances which finally moved the headlines away from the club’s incomprehensible transfer activity and the treatment of players like Conor Gallagher and Raheem Sterling. But as impressive as the rout of Gary O’Neil’s side was, those six goals papered over a fair few cracks.
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Hide AdGoing forward, Chelsea were pretty much inch-perfect, at least if you don’t pay too much attention to another lacklustre performance from Mykhaylo Mudryk. Cole Palmer was at his brilliant best, scoring a stunning goal and running the channels with impunity to assist a further three – all finished off by the marauding Noni Madueke, whose was gloriously lethal down the right wing. Even João Félix, whose £44.5m signing has been met by many with raised eyebrows and sighs, fired a fine finish home to add to the tally.
But for all of the brilliant play in the final third and the impressive control of possession in the second half (and the result, of course) there was at least one statistic which highlighted the fact that Enzo Maresca still has a lot of work to do - the expected goals. 1.96 of them for Wolves and just 1.68 for the visitors.
Expected goals mean nothing compared to actual ones, of course, and it doesn’t take a statistical expert to appreciate that Chelsea can’t expect to hit the opposition for six every time with chances falling either so far out, in the case of Palmer’s goal, or at such narrow angles, as Madueke’s were. Chelsea passed the ball well, moved dangerously around the Wolves goal and finished brilliantly. All of that is good news. The bad news is that there was no meaningful excuse for the volume and quality of the chances they presented to the hosts.
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Hide AdWolves’ first equaliser highlighted so many of the problems Maresca will have to deal with. After Moisés Caicedo was robbed of possession on halfway, there was a string of errors. Enzo Fernández went to challenge the ball-carrier, Rayan Aït-Nouri, but missed his tackle. Caicedo, presumably trying to atone for his mistake, ran across to try and get to Aït-Nouri as well but couldn’t get close and left a yawning gap down the Wolves left. Malo Gusto then came across to plug it, only to allow Mathues Cunha an astonishing amount of space to score at the back stick.
Caicedo and Gusto’s positional sense was awful, and Enzo’s attempt to win the ball was weak. Had that been one moment, it may have been a forgivable lapse to be swept carefully under the carpet, but there was more to come – shortly afterwards, Cunha hit the bar after being left entirely unmarked after three Chelsea defenders followed Jørgen Strand Larsen at the same time. And at the back post for the same chance, Gusto once again came too narrow to leave both Hwang Hee-Chan and Jean-Ricner Bellegarde wide open had the ball come to them instead. Then there was Wolves’ second goal, a set piece which the visitors made a hash of. Three Wolves players were queuing up for the second header, barely marked or bothered by a player in a blue shirt.
This isn’t the first time this season that defensive issues have reared their head – they were a regular worry throughout pre-season, and Maresca’s back line was carved open with ease not only by Manchester City, where it might be forgivable, but at times by Wrexham. The back four don’t seem to have developed any kind of understanding of each other’s movement and it’s far too common to see multiple players going for the same ball or following the same man, and the right side in particular seems to be a source of chaos and space for the opposition.
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Hide AdThat can be worked on, of course, and there is enough individual capability in the Chelsea defence to be optimistic that once the communication is improved, they will be rather more reliable – but the midfield screen is also a major problem right now, especially in the case of Fernández.
It would be a reach to say that the Argentina midfielder, who was controversially handed the captaincy last week in spite of filming himself singing a racist and transphobic chant after his country won the Copa América, has lived up to his £107m price tag, which briefly made him the most expensive man in the history of British football – and in Chelsea’s double pivot, he has yet to work out how to do the defensive duties required of him to the appropriate level.
The ease with which Aït-Nouri tricked his way past Fernández was not entirely atypical. Last season, he won less than half of his one-on-one duels and was dribbled past 1.4 times per match – almost as often as he made a tackle of any sort. Of all midfielders who made at least 20 appearances in the Premier League last season, only 16 were dribbled past with more regularity than Fernández, and none of them cost quite so much money.
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Hide AdHe has his qualities, but a player who is regularly beaten on the run is a problem when you also have an uncertain defence directly behind him – and it doesn’t help that Caicedo, while considerably more successful in defensive situations, has a habit of allowing himself to get sucked out of position too easily in deep areas. That was precisely the perfect storm that led to the opener. Enzo was beaten, Caicedo ran into a meaningless position in the vain hope of covering, Gusto tried to plug the hole and left his man, and Cunha had an extremely easy job to do.
Of course, you can get away with quite a few defensive mistakes when you score six, and Maresca is clearly committed to playing attacking football – but they still only created enough chances to score once or twice in a more typical game, and there is only so often that the individual excellence of their attackers will allow them to carve six goals out of such a small number of genuinely good chances. On another day, that game would end up as a 2-2 draw or a 3-1 defeat with no real change in the pattern of play.
If Chelsea want to get back into serious top four contention, they need to find ways to stop defenders from getting themselves into bad positions and develop a midfield structure which prevents them from being exposed at the back quite so often. This was a great result against a perfectly capable team, but one which owed too much to individual brilliance and not enough to the team as a whole, and better sides will make too much hay through the middle, where a team playing a double pivot should be at their strongest.
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Hide AdMaresca has a lot of work to do, not that getting a hefty win early in the process will do any harm whatsoever. Sunday was still a good day for a club which has endured quite a few bad ones since the current ownership group took charge. But there were also plenty of warning signs – and they won’t get away with their mistakes quite so easily every time.
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