Liam Rosenior should ditch LinkedIn methods & embrace Chelsea madness | OneFootball

Forget Mikel Arteta, Jake Humphrey or Steven Bartlett. Before Chelsea’s match with West Ham, Liam Rosenior was giving real Eric Cartman vibes.

At first glance, it’s hard to connect the dots between Rosenior’s ex-Guardian columnist earnestness and South Park’s posterboy for ignorance and intolerance.

But Cartman is an example of how the human mind develops coping mechanisms to shield from life’s inconvenient truths.

In the infamous ‘Fishsticks’ episode, Cartman steals Jimmy’s joke and tells everybody it was his own creation.

The twist is that Cartman isn’t knowingly bullsh*ting. He genuinely believes the joke was his. Cartman’s ego had convinced him of a false reality, to the extent of completely lying to himself.

Prior to his Chelsea appointment last month, Rosenior had taken Hull to a whisker of the Championship play-offs and Strasbourg into the top half of Ligue 1.

His Linkedin speel has been widely mocked, turning the Chelsea dressing room into a Year Six holiday club with Lego building and table tennis, but it must come from a place of insecurity.

As much as his hand was forced, Rosenior wouldn’t have accepted the Chelsea job if he didn’t believe in his own capabilities.

But his interviews and general demeanour suggest an overcompensation, of a subconscious that’s aware he lacks the stature and pedigree for one of English football’s biggest jobs.

The nature of Saturday’s win could begin to change all that.

Neutered

It cannot be overstated how bad Chelsea were in the first half against West Ham.

Making seven changes was a mistake, a spreadsheet-led decision to optimise resources and ignoring the latent intensity of the District Line derby.

West Ham deserved their 2-0 lead, pressing Chelsea into countless errors and carving them open at will. Rosenior’s mid-half team-talk, complete with notepad, seemed to have an anti-effect.

Liam Delap was more akin to a farmhand chasing a pig through a turnip field than a Premier League footballer. Cole Palmer played with the dolefulness of a recently neutered family pet.

But the crowd’s ire was mainly directed at Alejandro Garnacho, a shadow of the player who broke through at Manchester United.

Garnacho has developed the compulsion of sideways and backwards passes that inflicts too many top-level footballers in 2026.

It was the worst performance by a Chelsea forward since Raheem Sterling’s disasterclass against Leicester two years ago. Garnacho was one of three deservedly hooked at half-time.

Rosenior watched much of the first 45 stood entirely still, hand on chin and wearing the whitest trainers in human history. In retrospect, he was cooking up the PowerPoint of his life.

Changes

The 41-year-old’s short reign to date has been marked by an ability to correct his own mistakes, taking decisive action to overwhelm opponents.

The counterpoint is that Chelsea bought on Pedro Neto, Marc Cucurella, Wesley Fofana, Joao Pedro and Reece James, flexing both their squad depth and their financial superiority.

West Ham were already wobbling when Nuno Espirito Santo surrendered the game, taking off their best presser Pablo and bringing on Max Kilman, whose feet have been surgically replaced with paving stones.

But it was the game’s decisive tactical switch. Chelsea smelt blood and ripped the Hammers to shreds, the eventual comeback as inevitable as death and taxes.

We can spend hours debating Chelsea’s transfer policy, more reflective of a financial engineering project than a football club, but they had several players ideal for this exact situation.

Cucurella, both defender and professional irritant, scored the second goal in a penalty box awash with flailing arms and legs.

He could start a fight in a Post Office queue, as Adama Traore demonstrated in injury time by flinging him off the field and sparking a mass brawl.

Neto is maligned by Chelsea fans, and his Rivaldo-esque milking of one clash was distasteful, but he put in several good crosses from both flanks.

Captain Enzo Fernandez has rarely looked like a £105million player, but there was no doubting his cojones; he almost gave Stamford Bridge a good look at them, threatening to strip naked after scoring the winner.

It felt like a cup game where the favourites had underestimated their lower-league opponents and called upon the cavalry to retrieve it.

Managers aren’t normally called geniuses in these situations, not that it stopped the BBC from getting carried away and slapping the label on Rosenior post-match.

Credit

But where the Chelsea boss deserves praise is for ditching the rehearsed football for something more primal, going for the kill and taking the crowd with them.

In an era where ‘systems managers’ are gradually getting exposed for their dogmatic limitations, Rosenior had the emotional intelligence here to rip up his gameplan.

It won’t work for every game; not every opponent will have West Ham’s defence, cursed with the structural integrity of Twiglets.

The less charitable will say this win had a significant element of monkeys and typewriters.

But Chelsea had never won a Premier League game from 2-0 down at half-time. And this is exactly how young managers grow.

“As long as the team showed a fight and the energy and the intensity that they did in that second half, the fans showed that they’ll be with us and they’ll support us,” Rosenior said afterwards.

“I said to the players at half-time, we can make what probably is the worst feeling of the season the best feeling of the season.”

Managing Chelsea in 2026 requires the poise of a tightrope walker, navigating both the micro-managing ownership and fans used to a conveyor belt of success and trophies.

Rosenior is trying to do two Rubik’s cubes at the same time, one in each hand. Advice from LinkedIn will only take you so far in the Chelsea henhouse.

The stream of inspo-b*llocks will surely subside once he gets more comfortable at Stamford Bridge. Saturday’s win over West Ham has won him the space to do so.