It’s hardly surprising Chelsea’s spectacular nosedive of late is being debated all over the football world right now. Everyone has an opinion, be it Wilkins untimely departure and Roman’s meddling, injuries to key players and a lack of depth or sheer laziness from those who are fit to play, we hear various versions on a daily basis.
Like I said, hardly surprising seeing as the last few weeks we seemed to have rolled over to let United and even Arsenal claw back both the points and goal difference we’d built up with such a good start to the season. As it turns out, it’s just as well we did get off to a flier otherwise we’d be a lot more trouble than we seem to be right now. But what is it all about? And more to the point, can we stop the rot?
Taking the departure of Ray Wilkins, the timing of it could definitely have been better, as stabilising influences go it won’t have exactly settled the players but realistically, would they suddenly have forgotten what to do over the course of 90 minutes just because Wilkins wasn’t in the dug-out? Unlikely and even more unlikely is that the form at the start of our season was purely because Wilkins was there then. No, as much as I’d have preferred him to stay as much as the next man, the fact is our form was already well on the decline before Wilkins was shown the door.
What of Roman’s interference then? Is this the key to our decline? Well, I’m sure an eyebrow or two would have been raised at the appointment of Michael Emenalo, no doubt an unwelcome reminder of events from the past but surely the players are well used to Roman’s involvement by now? Besides, they managed to get over the departure of Jose Mourinho so losing Wilkins shouldn’t really be too difficult in the grand scheme of things.
On to the injuries then, and it’s fair to say these have had somewhat of an impact. Yes of course, all teams have injuries to deal with over the course of a season and the answer to that is the bog-standard response of ‘that’s what squads are for’ but maybe going into this season with no more than prayers to cover us if injuries hit wasn’t the club’s best contingency plan? Obviously the thinking behind it would have been that maybe we’d have one key player missing here and there, two at worst, so we wouldn’t keep him upstairs too busy, but when we suddenly found ourselves missing Lampard, Terry, Benayoun, Zhirkov, Bosingwa coming back from a year out, Alex playing despite a very obvious need for surgery, Didier Drogba clearly struggling to get over a bout of Malaria and Essien banned, well then you’d have to suspect there’s only so many Hail Mary’s He can respond to at once.
Maybe a better plan would have been to replace covering players like Joe Cole, Michael Ballack, Juliano Belletti, Ricardo Carvalho and Deco with something a little stronger than Ramires and Benayoun (who we can discount anyway, seeing as he isn’t playing)? Or better still, keeping a couple of them to start with? Because let’s face it, a squad of 19 (3 of whom are keepers), always had the potential to bite us on the arse anyway. And so it’s proved because as much as I’d like nothing more than to see our younger players brought through, it’s unrealistic and quite frankly complete madness to expect them to provide cover for the likes of Terry, Lampard and Essien. Our youngsters should be brought through slowly, given their opportunities once a game is safe, not given the burden of expectation because senior players are either unfit or just bloody uninterested.
Which brings us on to the final, and probably most worrying possibility for our decline – our players just can’t be arsed. That certainly seemed to be the case in our woeful performance and embarrassing defeat to Sunderland. Where once we just didn’t seem to know when we were beat – and as a result generally weren’t – of late, once we go behind, all too often, that’s where we stay.
We look devoid of ideas, lack creativity and more importantly – effort. Essien may have started the season looking like a player full of purpose and energy yet by the time we played Fulham, he resorted to the sort of challenge that got him a bad reputation years ago and saw him miss the next 3 Premier League games. And Essien’s return against Everton was only marginally less tentative than the Chelsea captain’s, with John Terry almost as deep as Cech half the time. Add to that Didier Drogba looking as deadly as Shipman without a prescription and even Malouda struggling to get himself noticed now, it’s little wonder the early season fear factor has gone for our opponents. So how do we get it back? Or is it all doom and gloom from here on in?
Well, The Chelsea Blog might be cynical but even on here, we’re prepared to see our recent form as a bit of a nightmare rather than a complete disaster. Of course, we really can’t afford to lose any more games if we want a shot at the title now and with Spurs, United and Arsenal all on the horizon at one of the worst possible times we could face them, you wouldn’t put your house on us anymore but in terms of salvaging something out of the season – it’s nothing a good kick up the arse and some decent cover from the January window won’t fix, right?
Blue is the colour
