Reality Check

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There's absolutely nothing to debate.

I think it was the worst attacking performance, particularly the second half. I actually looking back over the highlights, Chelsea created some pretty good dangerous moments in the first half. I thought Christian Pulisic in particular was very, very good continuing on from his recent form. But Olivier Giroud wasn't really able to do anything beyond making a few decoy runs to create space for Pulisic. He wasn't involved in the game at all. I wrote a piece about him afterwards. He touched the ball 21 times, which was the fewest of any Chelsea starter in any game this season. And then obviously in the second half, Lampard's decision to take him off and go with a false 9 rather than bringing on Mishy Batshuai actually contributed to the problems Chelsea were having in the final third and they barely created anything. It was quite comfortable for West Ham in the end.

Well, I think most of it was geared around getting the wingers into good positions. I mean, you often saw Pedro making that run from out to. In which he's traditionally been so good at. He was actually quite bright, I thought, in the first 10, 15 minutes and then faded really badly and. And Pulisic was trying to do the same from the other side, and it just felt like Giroud was almost a false nine from the start. Giroud.

Two goals.

The thing is as well is that he doesn't Offer enough outside the box. He's an instinctive finisher, but the consensus among all the people that managed him over the years that he plays on instinct. He's quite slow to take in new tactical concepts and he. He arrived at Chelsea as more of a second striker from France and he hasn't really adapted his game to lead the line in a time when most clubs, particularly most top clubs, are playing one up front. He's bulked up, but he doesn't really know how to play with his back to goal and link play. If you could actually combine Giroud's skill set with Batshuai's skill set, you'd have a really good starting striker for a top club. But unfortunately they've both got weaknesses it's quite difficult to overlook.

Well, Cesare Pilicueta might have something to say about being the best defender at the club, but centre back? Yeah, certainly Rudiger is not only the most reliable, but he's also the most experienced and the strongest personality, the one who could maybe fit most seamlessly into that organising role that Chelsea seem to lack. I've heard a common criticism of Christensen in particular is that he seems to be a very quiet character, very technically sound, very calm defender, but occasionally maybe not quite loud enough. And it's, yeah, it's difficult when you're constantly mixing and matching combinations. It's difficult to have that success. So much defensive success is collective rather than individual in terms of chemistry. And there's also, you know, a systemic balance with Kante coming in and out of the team. It's quite difficult to balance attack and defence when the team are trying to play so expansively under Lampard. When Jorginho is your deepest midfielder, there are inherent trade offs in that and they're still trying to find that and I don't necessarily see them finding it this season with this personnel. It might be something that they have to do some work in the transfer.

Well, he's not become like a dominating defender, has he? I mean the problem is that Chelsea have a lot of good individual personnel and a lot of really promising guys with potentially quite high ceilings. But in order to upgrade that, you may be talking about like a van Dijk Koulibaly bracket of defender. First of all, there aren't many of them around. And second of all, you're gonna have to pay upwards almost £100 million to be able to get them. So it's a tricky one. Maybe there will be collective improvement as they grow together individually and together in terms of experience, but in terms of huge gains, it might be something that happens beyond this season.

I spent quite a long time agonizing over it, but not to the point of asking anyone else.

I settled on the opposite of the wisdom of crowds. It was just the wisdom of me. And I did a fair deep dive into the stats because I didn't trust just your memories of what players had done and achieved. And the formation kind of picked itself. Once I decided which players were Absolute locks and which positions. I had big decisions to make. I thought Courtois and Cech would have been a more difficult decision than it ended up being, because once I looked at the stats, Cech got significantly more clean sheets than Courtois and he actually made Arsenal's team of the decade as well. I don't know if you saw. That was really interesting. So that was quite an easy one. In the end, Mata was probably the most controversial one in the attacking positions, Although I also went for Drogba over Costa, which I know annoyed Dom, didn't annoy me.

Yeah. I mean, do you want me to justify the most controversial ones now or.

Yeah, I mean, the kind of first act of his Chelsea career is absolutely crazy. Eight months he had to wait to make his debut, partly due to injury and partly because, in his words, he came into a Chelsea squad that was a really strong machine, marching towards the Champions League Final. And eventually, when he gets his chance, he's at right back, not at centre back, and that kind of conditions everything that happens from there. But he was thinking about leaving, maybe going on loan because opportunities were that difficult to come by. And Shevchenko became a close friend to him early on because he didn't know English, so he was kind of his personal chaperone around Cobham. He said that the other senior players showed an interest in him, but it was Shevchenko who was next to him and talking to him, and Abramovich gave him a sort of personal pep talk and convinced him to stay and wait for his chance as well. And it worked out best for everyone because he undoubtedly became a Chelsea legend, albeit probably one of the more underrated ones of the last 10 years. I was quite personally happy for him. The Europa League final that he got that moment because it was the kind of signature moment that his Chelsea career probably deserved, particularly after missing the Champions League final as well. And when you look at how durable he was, you know, everyone talks about John Terry playing every minute of the 201415 title season. That was an amazing achievement. But Ivanovic did as well. He was kind of Azpilicueta before Azpilicueta. And I think part of the reason why I ended up with Azpilicueta at left back was because I felt I needed to get Ivanovic in and they both needed to be in.

He's a bit, he's a bit more chatty now thankfully. But those were the things actually where he kind of gave the worst answers about were when I invited him to talk about his goals, his moments, because clearly a very team first guy and he was much better talking about his teammates and the great teams he was a part of rather than the things he's perhaps best remembered for.

Mainly that. But I also thought that the performance actually in Conte's team two years later was really significant as well. Because even though he wasn't part of the regular starting 11 of that team, he still got more assists than anyone else in the entire squad. He got 12 assists despite starting only 13 games. And Conte would generally start with Nemanja Matic and n' Golo Kante and then bring Fabregas on once the game had opened up. And his vision could really be devastating. It was almost like a. A quarterback wide receiver chemistry with Diego Costa. The amount of passes he would just float over the top.

Most of the memories people associate with him are from that 14, 15 season. 18 assists. Incredible. And his presence at the base of that midfield fundamentally changed the character of that Chelsea team. What had been quite a pragmatic team the year before grinding out results suddenly played actually quite swashbuckling football for the first six months of that season anyway. And I just felt for being the creative hub of two title winning teams, it's a pretty significant achievement within the context of the decade. Two of the biggest things Chelsea had won.

Yeah, I'm incredibly bullish on this one. You know, people raise an eyebrow because he's actually made far more appearances for Manchester United, even though his Manchester United injustice of Mata's Chelsea career or his career as a whole is that people don't remember just how bloody good he was in those two seasons. It wasn't just the moments, you know, man of the match in the FA cup final, the two most important crosses in Chelsea's history up to that point, probably for Didier Drogba and Ivanovic in those two European finals. He was so regularly the best player on the pitch, player of the season in both of his full seasons. And because Chelsea were in transition because they weren't a title contender, tends to be a little bit forgotten. But he was only really ostracized because Mourinho came in, decided that he wanted a number 10 that would be destructive and foul people and lead the press as Oscar would. But Oscar could never hold the torch to matter in terms of pure footballing ability and creativity. And I think he made such a huge impression in those two years that it outweighs, really Willian's six years and outweighs Pedro's. What is it?

Yeah, four. So there weren't actually that many alternatives when you think about it. The biggest issue you could raise maybe is that I've shoehorned him in on the right wing, which I'm not the first person to do that.

I mean, the only reason it wasn't regarded as a disastrous transfer is because Manchester United was such a mess. They bought him without any sense of a plan of how to use him and they never built the team around him. And unfortunately he also then declined as a player, maybe a little bit quicker than you would expect. But really that should have come back to haunt Chelsea in a way that it actually didn't.

And Radamel Falcao. Yes, yeah, I did think about it for quite a long time. And if you look at the baseline Premier League stats, there isn't really a comparison. Costa's much better. He hits 20 goals in two of his three seasons and I think he's Chelsea's top scorer in each of those seasons. But he never put together an entire campaign, even the two, two years that Chelsea won the league. He almost had to be carried to the finish line once because his hamstrings had given out and the other because he was angling to get out the door, having fallen out with Conte Drogba's Premier League stats. Yeah, obviously week to week, he didn't quite have it after 2009, 10, which was his career season under Carlo Ancelotti, but he still had that ability to summon greatness when it really mattered most. And I forgot, actually, until I look back on it, that he scored the winning goal in the 2012 FA Cup Final as well, because I don't really remember that game, but obviously the Champions League final, he scored six goals in eight games on that run. And you look back at them, they all came at crucial moments when Chelsea really needed something. And that was the most important thing Chelsea did in that decade and he made it possible. So I think that really was the clincher. And then of course, he came back and had that season as Costa's backup and he actually made quite a few appearances that year and was quite solid. So that didn't make a huge difference. But, you know, Munich is his legacy, I think.

My favorite player to cover.

No, he was a crime couture, wasn't he?

Do you remember when. I think it was maybe his final season at Chelsea when they brought in new. They kind of brought in the new directive, clamping down on dissent. And he got booked in every single game. We just thought, is this going to carry on? Is he just going to get booked in every single Premier League game he plays this season? But, yeah, prime, Costa was the best striker Chelsea had in this decade. But he also took quite a bit away from the team when he wasn't working for them.

Yeah.

Indeed, yeah. It's quite difficult to know which way anything's going to go at this point. But yeah, we're also working on the joint read for later in the week, which is looking like it will be about Ross Barkley, who's at an interesting crossroads in his Chelsea career as they head back to Goodison park to face Everton.

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