BREAKING NEWS:“You must show these skills against Brentford” – Mykhailo Mudryk shows crazy skills in training
Chelsea have ‘new’ Mykhailo Mudryk option vs Brentford after ‘secret’ prediction comes true
Chelsea news as Mykhailo Mudryk makes his breakthrough for the Blues against Arsenal after football.london told you he would
This wasn’t Mykhailo Mudryk’s best game for Chelsea. He didn’t dazzle or take on opponents with the consistency and speed that he has in patches. He didn’t create things from nothing, skipping past opponents and sliding a ball through the lines to open up a shooting chance for his teammate. The goal he scored he didn’t even mean, come on.
Yet, there is something beneath all of this that says this was Mudryk’s most important game for Chelsea. The momentum had been building for a performance like this that just hadn’t been seen of him so far. In the first nine months of his career in England the words electric have been used but so has raw, unpredictable and largely unreliable.
Mudryk is a maverick who is not fully tamed and perhaps doesn’t truly need to be. He needed time, to be well-coached and to be given a chance to grow. These things rarely happen at Chelsea, let alone in the foreground of a massive transfer spend, a proper battle with London rivals to be signed and the ever-changing nature of the club.
What made this Mudryk performance at home to Arsenal so impressive was how ordinary, in part, it was. He didn’t give the ball away trying to do Mudyky things but scared Ben White enough to look like he might breeze past him on every occasion. The best example of just how much of a team performance this was came via his work off the ball.
It’s hard to win plaudits as an attacker worth over £62million ($75m) for defending in a solid and compact way but when it came to having Marc Cucurella and Mudryk against White, Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard drifting to the right, many would rightfully have feared for the Blues backline.
In reality, Mudryk kept Arsenal quiet and would have surely been on the winning side had his goalkeeper not laid on up for Declan Rice. This was something that people didn’t think Mudryk could do right now or would be able to do this quickly. It is part of why he was left on the sidelines during the early weeks of the season with Ben Chilwell preferred due to defensive knowhow and trust.
Mudryk developed, grew and had time to bond with his manager and has started to bring the goods. It wasn’t like there were no other choices here either. Noni Madueke is yet to win over Pochettino like Mudryk has and Nicolas Jackson could easily have started and that would have left Mudryk as the most likely player to drop out of the side in his place.
Instead, it was the Ukrainian that got the nod and he didn’t disappoint. The goal was one scored and almost earned out of trying so much. It had a slice of luck and relied either on David Raya’s poor positioning, the stormy west London weather or a newly learned skill of not having to look where he’s crossing. It didn’t matter though because the celebration and reaction he once again got from the crowd were that of a seasoned scorer.
It also did what many had hoped but perhaps not truly believed would happen. Almost in response to a piece written by football.london last week predicting Mudryk to have a breakout game in this meeting, Mudryk silenced the away fans. He is still mocked for the stray touches and what is still an enigmatic shot when he tries from distance, but it comes with the fact that he got one over Arsenal.
For 30 minutes it looked to be the goal that would seal the game. In the aftermath, it was still the goal that meant that Arsenal left Stamford Bridge with less points than they had hoped for and less than they usually take away. It was also written here that Mudryk had the chance to get one over his fellow countryman, Oleksandr Zinchenko and he did just that.
The Arsenal defender was hauled off at half-time having failed to offer much on the ball or in terms of dealing with Raheem Sterling and Cole Palmer going the other way. Mudryk might not have been central to this but his positioning, stopping White and Saka from progressing on Arsenal’s right, saw more onus on Zinchenko on the left and he wasn’t able to break down the stubborn block deployed by Pochettino.
Now playing with confidence to not only back his output going one way, the third reason that football.london predicted he would be a difference maker, Mudryk was able to combine general astuteness with quality. It wasn’t the exciting and consistently dangerous performance that many expect or the scruff-of-the-neck taking display that still waits but it was a giant step in the right direction.
The feeling has been that Mudryk was not ready to play these games from a defensive standpoint let alone impact them positively going forward in a way that doesn’t relinquish control. Those issues and concerns have now been answered on the biggest stage and it has to be said, we told you so. As did the players, ex-players and teammates that have seen Mudryk up close and personal.
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