BREAKING NEWS: Chelsea Fc have decided to do away with Player who hasn’t made any Performance since brought into the team
“He’s just a bench warmer and we’ve tried everything to make him useful to the team,he’s place is not here in Chelsea anymore” Says Potchettino in an interview this morning.
Mauricio Pochettino giveth and Mauricio Pochettino taketh away. Chelsea’s gruelling pre-season fitness pile on for a group of physically unready players already looks to have taken its toll.
Pochettino, by now famed for his laughing personal trainer-type attitude to grinding his players down into the ground in the off-season in order to have them reach new heights of endurance and longevity, is facing some of the consequences. “We did the Gacon one day and we were meant to do 10 runs,” Ben Chilwell explained of the short-distance, bleep-test-y sprints Chelsea players were forced through numerous times in America.
But we got to the eighth and the manager – I still don’t know if he was doing a mental trick on us – said we could stop if we wanted. Everyone was on their knees after the eighth one and he said, ‘If everyone completes the next two, I’ll take you all out for dinner.'”
Stories from his time at Southampton indicate that he was punishingly brutal and even doubled the tally of runs after a complaint made by Rickie Lambert. Chilwell said he felt as fit as he ever had, a good sign at the time for a player that has had a lengthy injury in each of his three years since joining the club.
It hasn’t stopped yet another setback for the 26-year-old though and he is once more in the treatment room with fellow wing-back extraordinaire, Reece James. The pair have become frustratingly acquainted in missing games at the same time and watching on.
What we’ve seen [on Sunday] is that Chelsea have fantastic wing-backs but they’ve both gone off, first game of the season,” Gary Neville said of the full-back struggles one game into the new term. “That will destroy Pochettino’s plans. If you’re going to play wing-backs, they have to be outstanding players of high quality, who attack like wingers and defend like full-backs, and they have that
For Burnley and what is expected to be several weeks after the international break, Pochettino will be working without his first choice players once more. The lucky part is that there are already ample replacements lined up unlike before. Chelsea fans having to watch Marcos Alonso and Cesar Azpilicueta deputise on lungbusting attacks behind James and Chilwell will be haunted by the memory.
Luckily there are now other options. Malo Gusto has proven himself to be a solid and already surprisingly adept shadow for James in the early weeks of the season and even a fully-fit Chilwell wasn’t able to keep Levi Colwill out of the squad out of position. Colwill, not natural to the role but so far proving to be more than useful, is now one of four players that can feature at left-back.
The right-side is less densely populated and moves for Axel Disasi or even a fit Trevoh Chalobah to full-back would be more uncomfortable than Colwill shifting across. Gusto is not yet eligible to return to the team having only served two of his three game suspension following a red card against Aston Villa and James is a near comical mixture of injured and now suspended himself.
The 24-year-old, new club captain, has followed in the footsteps of Nicolas Jackson and Raheem Sterling in finding ways to pick up punishment outside of fouls. He has been fined and banned for one-match after aiming some foul-mouthed jibes at the officials following the 1-0 loss to Villa, a game he was out of through injury anyway
The suspension means that any hopes of a pre-international break return are out of the window. Pochettino, though, has found an unlikely answer to the problem. Initially a surprise against Brighton, Marc Cucurella’s new calling as a right-back has saved Chelsea some extra tinkering.
Having not played a single minute of league action he started against Fulham and put in a second solid showing in a row. Rolling out a defensive performance that of Azpilicueta – a pioneer of playing on the wrong side of defence – Cucurella was able to lock down Fulham’s most dangerous area of the pitch.
Antonee Robinson, Willian and Andreas Pereira were all largely ineffective on the night and couldn’t find a way past Cucurella. He made six clearances, not choosing to risk a miss-placed pass on his wrong foot, rather going directly towards Armando Broja. The build-up with Palmer wasn’t really on show but after Chelsea raced into a two-goal lead he didn’t need to be too adventurous.
It means that he has now been part of back-to-back cleansheets in an unorthodox back-four and has surprised many with his ability to adapt. Vincent Kompany’s Burnley will ask new questions and different ones too but for what is likely to be just one game before James and Gusto return in tandem, the ship is in safe hands – much safer ones than many had imagined just 10 days ago.
It is a credit to Pochettino and to Cucurella that they have been able to make this system work and if he can continue to put in defensive showings of this level then there will be undoubted ambitions to make the most of Chilwell’s absence and also find inroads into getting another shot on his natural side in the future as well.
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