“Quite jarring” – Athletic writer explains how Chelsea blew away PSG with early blitz | OneFootball

It’s Tuesday morning already, but the footballing world is still talking about Chelsea’s win over PSG in the Club World Cup final on Sunday night.

The Blues blew away the Parisians with a powerful performance, and on the Totally Football Show they had the Athletic’s Chelsea man Liam Twomey on to discuss the game.

Twomey on Chelsea’s early PSG blitz

Cole Palmer scores against PSG. (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

“It was a very interesting game plan from Maresca, and it actually contained elements of what went very wrong against Flamengo in the group stage, where did didn’t have either full back inverting into midfield,” Twomey explained.

“He had Malo Gusto pushing really high on the right, and that allowed Cole Palmer to come inside into that “pocket” as Maresca calls it. And they had Reece James starting in midfield as they did against Flamengo, but it worked much, much better than it did in that game. They largely pressed PSG man for man, it was really aggressive, particularly in the conditions, and Maresca said after the game that they won the game in the first ten minutes… they really set the tone in terms of intensity. It was quite jarring how dominant Chelsea were early on in that first stretch, they were making PSG make some really uncharacteristic errors, and the front 3 for PSG were almost non existent.”

Chelsea finally start fast and get their reward

We have despaired so many times about slow starts from Chelsea in the last few years, so it was glorious to see them actually step up and perform right from the first whistle. As Twomey points out, we rattled a team who are so used to being the ones who control the early stages, and we never looked back. All we needed to do was score to cement that advantage, and once we had done that things never looked like changing.