It’s hard to know what felt longer: Sunday’s 0-0 draw at Brentford, or the time since Chelsea looked like title challengers. Their season is far from over, and could yet end with success, but there’s a slight sense of drift right now. That is only in-keeping with the wider Premier League season, to be fair, which should prompt a wider discussion. Enzo Maresca’s side really shouldn’t have had a match within 72 hours of their last, which he felt was “unfair”.
Even within that, there is still a pertinent debate to be had about what Chelsea are, and could be. Many within the Premier League would say that should be a club facing up to significant punishment, given the investigation into irregular payments from Roman Abramovich’s time and the current talks with Uefa over potential financial rule breaches from the sale of the women’s team to a sister company.
It sums up the team right now, though, that developments off the pitch remain so much more colourful. That is separate to the toil for Champions League qualification, but may influence it.
There was so little urgency to the play in the Brentford game, despite the reality that Chelsea need to win for qualification, all the more so given PSR concerns.
That diminished impetus has been a recent trend, regardless of Maresca’s reasonable complaints about the scheduling. It has especially been the case on the road, given this was the eighth successive away game without victory for Chelsea in the Premier League.
Five of those have involved blanks, going back to the 0-0 away to Everton just before Christmas. The other three games have meanwhile only featured three Chelsea goals.
That 0-0 at Everton coincidentally came after a 2-1 home win over Brentford, that was the last of a five-game winning streak. It was also the last time Chelsea looked like challengers.
The truth even then was that they were overperforming, and results have inevitably levelled out since. The growing concern is the extent to which they’ve levelled out.
So many of their matches are so flat, which very directly translate into flat passes across the back or from Robert Sanchez. This feels all the more pronounced with Maresca away from home. The Italian is ultimately a disciple of Pep Guardiola’s positional game, and more dogmatic about that ideology than most. The wider game has now evolved so much, however, that that positional game in its purest form can look rather featureless against new approaches that involve more risk-taking.
Thomas Frank arguably brings more of the latter, and the Brentford coach was unusually caustic in repeatedly bringing up Chelsea’s spending after the game. He was also insistent his team had the better of the game, with more clear chances. The latter was certainly true. Frank pointed to how Chelsea mostly had a series of long shots, beyond one Reece James header. Against that, Mikkel Damsgaard, Keane Lewis-Potter and Sepp van den Berg all had misses from close to goal.
Much of that was down to how Maresca did not start Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson due to the schedule, and you could feel it as much as ...
