Chelsea remain a puzzle under Enzo Maresca but the vital next step is obvious | OneFootball

Chelsea beat Lincoln this week, which you might have seen. It was about as unremarkable as Carabao Cup third-round ties get but it has stuck with me for the following reason: when watching the graphics that revealed the starting line-up, I made that audible noise of surprised recognition for no fewer than four players selected by Enzo Maresca. “Oh yeah, him”.

There’s maybe a point there about the scope of my short-to-medium term memory but the one I’m actually going to make is this; over the last five years Chelsea have spent about £750m - roughly the GDP of most Caribbean island nations - and came out feeling exactly the same as a weekday evening seven-a-side team.

Just in case that’s not the universal experience I think it is, let me explain. From the ages of ‘just graduated’ to ‘my back’s gone’ most people are in at least one WhatsApp group that exists to organise a regular game of football. In most cases, the requirement is merely to get between five and seven people to agree to play. And yet; a) there will be upwards of 40 people in that group and b) you’ll still somehow be two short on the morning of the event.

The faces will change every single week, someone will bring a passable friend to fill in who you’ll never see again, it’s maybe the most beautifully consistent experience of British culture and we simply never talk about.

As an aside, if you have someone in your friendship group who takes the time to organise these games, collect the money, and show up every week, then hold on to them tightly and never let them go. When they finally have a child or age into a bad knee it’s actually your life that will irrevocably change for the worse.

Anyway, that’s Chelsea. The signing of Alejandro Garnacho was just Cole Palmer messaging the group to say “this lad I play Fifa with said he can come down, winger, meant to be good” and Maresca replying “👍”.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that there’s a tangible disjointedness to them. Granted, we’re seven games in and part of that is to be expected, but this ‘yet to really click’ feeling has already seen very winnable points pass them by. And while they managed to avoid the potential banana skin of Lincoln City, the Imps did quite neatly highlight this issue.

Take the goal. At the moment that pass is intercepted, it has sailed from one touchline to the other, despite Chelsea not having a single player occupying the zone where you’d expect to see both centre-backs and one or both of the midfield 6s. This is because Enzo Fernandez and Andrey Santos are free to roam around in the early possession phases to find both space and passes, and Trevor Chalobah and Wesley Fofana (“oh yeah, him”), split as wide as they can at goal-kicks for the exact same reason.

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(Chelsea/EFL)

Now individually all of these things are fine, but they do combine to make that pass a very bad idea. Either Fernandez should know not to do it when his three team-mates are in these positions, or his three team-mates need to know that he ‘just can’t help himself sometimes’ and set themselves to react to it. But this is Santos’ 5th ever appearance in a Chelsea shirt, and Fofana’s first start since March. That stuff takes time.

The most glaring example though came earlier on, when Chalobah, Fernandez, and Santos all suddenly decide to be responsible for the same player, and wind up looking like bowling pins as a result. To start, note that the two midfielders are defending the men on the edge of the box, and the defender is covering the space behind them. They’re well set.

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(Chelsea/EFL)

As Fernandez gets easily dribbled around (bad), Santos decides to help him out by abandoning his man (bad) and putting pressure on the ball. Meanwhile, for reasons known only to him, Chalobah has decided he can’t trust either of them here and has vacated the space (bad) to go charging out (bad) and left Fofana in an offside black hole (bad). A quite deft reverse pass takes all of them completely out of the game, and were it not for the Lincoln groundsman repainting that post over the summer they’d have gone behind.

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(Chelsea/EFL)

Reminder: Lincoln City play in League One. Smashing West Ham was pretty much par for the course, there’s no shame in losing to Bayern Munich, and Crystal Palace have seemingly enabled some sort of cosmic glitch that prevents them from ever losing a football match, but the late equaliser against Brentford and defeat to Manchester United already feel like big moments in their season.

We’ll skip past Garnacho seemingly checking his phone instead of defending the back post, and instead get to Moises Caicedo. He’s been Maresca’s most reliable asset all season - at times holding the entire midfield together in this 3-1-6 shape they seem committed to - but in the build up to the Sanchez red card found himself in another ‘what are any of us actually doing here’ trap.

With Marc Cucurella and Malo Gusto seemingly instructed to jump high to press the wing-backs (in this case Noussair Mazraoui and Patrick Dorgu), that left Chelsea with a possible 2v3 against the front line. The solution was to have Caicedo keep an eye on Bryan Mbeumo, dropping in to form a back three if a long ball, like this one, beats the press with the full-backs pushed up field. Fine. Good idea.

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(Manchester United/Premier League)

Where it falls down is that Caicedo is not a left-back, or a left-sided centre back, and has precisely zero experience of tracking blindside runs beyond the defence from that part of the pitch. Benjamin Sesko wins the header, the ball’s knocked on, and unsurprisingly the central-midfielder filling in the wrong position doesn’t make the exact right decision in the split second he’s got to consider it.

And while a lot has been made about Robert Sanchez’s brief, fatal, moment of indecision that sees him take a backward step before deciding to go for the ball, that has seemingly obscured Fofana’s stuttering run that happens at the same time. Immediately after the header he also briefly stops, killing any chance he had of covering over.

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(Manchester United/Premier League)

Thing is, these are all bad decisions. But you’re allowed to make them. The best players in the world make loads of them every single game. Chelsea’s problem is that they continually have several players all making them at the same time, and that’s undoing a lot of the good work they’re doing elsewhere in games. Their press is better, their creativity is better, they finally seem like they’re unsticking themselves from this issue of being a high-tempo transitional side who are told to play patient possession football. They are trending upwards in all categories but - but! - routinely step their nice new shoes in runny dog eggs.

And it’s not that this should alarm Chelsea fans, necessarily. Maresca has demonstrated an ability to navigate issues like this and improve the team as he does it, so overall it’s more that this is a problem to be solved than an ultimately fatal flaw. It’s more just that it should frustrate you.

Since the Todd Boehly-led takeover in 2022, Chelsea have always felt like they’re going to be next season’s big challengers. From Thomas Tuchel to Mauricio Pochettino, via a surrealist six months of Graham Potter, Maresca is the first manager under this administration to get a second season in charge. It’s a level of structural consistency Chelsea haven’t enjoyed this side of the Covid lockdowns, and the next vital step is getting the players to act like it.