For a snapshot of Chelsea’s 2023/24 campaign so far look no further than Monday night’s 3-1 victory over Crystal Palace.
Wafting, formless football and tedious underachievement for the first 45 minutes, then tactical dexterity, speed, and light in the second: it was the Mauricio Pochettino era in microcosm, albeit the wrong way round.
The drift witnessed in the first half at Selhurst Park has only set in through these final few weeks of winter, when results began to grind everyone down and a cold, grey atmosphere sunk the players into an ennui that many pundits have incorrectly retrofitted onto the preceding months.
Chelsea’s season hasn’t really been like that, not for long at least.
From August through to late December Pochettino’s side have been playing like a Pochettino side: hard-running, high-pressing, vertically-inclined, and tactically malleable – outside the two boxes, that is.
Inside them is a different story.
Dreadful finishing at one end and defensive mistakes at the other have undermined the complicated patterns constructed between the two penalty areas, but because most neutrals only engage with teams in a highlights package (and because most pundits, failing to look closely, are highlights-oriented and result-led) the story of Chelsea’s under-the-bonnet progress is rarely understood.
But for those paying attention the second half at Palace was a perfect example.
"In the second half, the gaffer gave us more structure in their half of the pitch to try and create more chances,” Conor Gallagher told Sky Sports at full-time.
"Having the two strikers to make more runs in behind to create more space which I think it did. It was really good from the manager and definitely helped us to play better."
"We used two strikers in between the centre-back and the full-back [in the second half],” Pochettino explained. “We put [Malo] Gusto and [Ben] Chilwell higher and moved the ball quicker with Enzo [Fernandez] in a number 10 role.
"It helped us score."
It isn’t often that a player decides to inform the media of his coach’s tactical tweaks.
That Gallagher did perhaps speaks to the acknowledgement that Pochettino’s process needs labelling out loud; that time and patience should be afforded to a manager who inherited an almighty mess and is quietly bringing things together, regardless of what the results indicate.
Expected points (xP), based on xG data, has Chelsea fifth on 40 points, just 1.26 points behind Aston Villa in fourth and 6.37 points behind Liverpool in third. Truly, that reflects the eye test more than the real Premier League table.
Some more statistics: Chelsea have the fourth-best xG (45.3) and the fifth-lowest non-penalty xG against (31.1).
They top the Premier League charts for through-balls (75) and attempted take-ons (559), reflecting Pochettino’s Bielsa-like principles of transition-focused and straight-lined attacking football.
They have the fourth-best PPDA (10.2) - a metric which assesses how aggressive a team is without the ball, the lower the number, the more 'aggressive' they are - and are third for possessions won in the final third (153), suggesting his high-pressing ideals are also taking shape.
But these features don’t capture the imagination, not when Chelsea cannot put the ball in the net. They've missed more ‘big chances’ (47) than any other team in the Premier League and only Everton are underperforming their xG to a higher number than the Blues' -5.3.
Nicolas Jackson is rapidly improving in this regard, Conor Gallagher has started scoring, and, best of all, Christopher Nkunku – who scored 16 goals in 20 Bundesliga games last season – is finally back from injury.
Chelsea’s goalscoring issues might soon be behind them.
And their creativity will only improve if and when Pochettino finally gets his first-choice full-backs in place. Reece James and Ben Chilwell have scarcely been fit this season, and we know from his time at Tottenham that flying full-backs provide all the width in Pochettino’s narrow counter-pressing system.
James and Chilwell can be like Kyle Walker and Danny Rose, but only if they are consistently on the pitch.
Full-backs able to stretch the play – particularly via long switches, a hallmark of Bielsa and Pochettino teams – are especially important when faced with a low block, and it is these games in particular in which Chelsea have struggled.
If you order Chelsea’s Premier League games by possession share, their top ten (holding between 64% and 78%) have produced just three wins and 11 points.
Injuries, then, are getting in the way, and while that’s also true regarding Chelsea’s defending (they have eight defensive players on the sidelines at the time of writing) the ‘goals against’ problem has more to do with Pochettino possessing a young squad that are still getting to know each other.
From the 11 Chelsea players to have started at least 10 Premier League games this season, only Thiago Silva joined the club prior to the 2022/23 campaign and six of them are in their debut year at the club.
That will inevitably lead to some chaotic moments; some clumsy unforced errors as the team attempts to gel together.
No wonder, then, that Chelsea have made the second-most errors leading to shots (15) and are top of the Premier League for miscontrols (398).
Mistakes will happen – and that holds at both ends of the pitch.
Jackson’s glaring misses are understandable when you consider he is a 22-year-old in his second year of senior football, and any creativity issues against stubborn low blocks are excusable in the context of so many new faces learning about one another.
Pochettino is not to blame for any of this, and in fact he deserves far more credit than he’s receiving for Chelsea’s tactical complexity between the two boxes.
The win at Palace relieved some of the pressure on him and yet, as a microcosm of Chelsea’s season, it is revealing that most pundits have chosen to focus upon the dreadful first half, not the intelligent and entertaining second.
It’s a problem that will persist until results match performances.
Only then will people shift their perspective; only then will pundits pretend to have noticed tactical changes that were there all along.
But surveying the carnage of the Todd Boehly era thus far, and looking back upon his trigger-happy management, Pochettino probably won’t be shown the patience needed to reach that point.
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