N'Golo Kante: Richard Jolly analyses Chelsea's midfield destroyer and his changing role

The confirmation of the inevitable will come soon for Manchester City. They will lose their status as Premier League champions. They are the last team to retain the title. But, before Pep Guardiola’s group, the last player to do so was N’Golo Kante.

Back-to-back triumphs with Leicester in 2016 and Chelsea in 2017 were not the only times he topped tables. For three seasons, the hyperactive Frenchman was the Premier League’s greatest hunter-gatherer, chasing down opponents and pinching the ball. No one managed more interceptions in 2015-16 or 2017-18. In three successive years, he ranked first, second and third for tackles.

As Kante spends his week facing clubs who produced contrasting champions – Manchester City’s possession specialists then Leicester’s counter-attackers, who had just 44.8 percent of the ball in their glory year – he has had a career of two halves in England.

Not, as might logically be expected, of Leicester and Chelsea, but pre and post 2018. The Claudio Ranieri and Antonio Conte Kante was different to the variant deployed by Maurizio Sarri and Frank Lampard. Positionally, he was deeper. He was more of a destroyer. He had a centrality. He was the human dynamo at the heart of the team.

Now 65 players have won the ball back more often than the tackle king and, if injuries have limited Kante’s appearances and opportunities to snap at opponents’ heels in the last 10 months, he only ranked 21st last season. After everyone had played 30 league games, he had a share of 30th place for interceptions, which is actually an improvement on 44th under Sarri.

The anti-Sarri has actually pursued one of his predecessor’s more unpopular policies. Lampard’s critics have noted how his use of Kante has been less controversial than Sarri’s even though the brief is often similar: to be the right of a midfield trio normally anchored by Jorginho. The world’s best defensive midfielder has been reinvented as a more attacking force. It has brought improvement in some areas – Kante has seven goals in two seasons under Sarri and Lampard, after only three in the previous three – while taking away from his core strengths. He has gone from a league leader at getting the ball back to a more mid-ranking performer.

He has found himself at the heart of football’s philosophical divide. Jorginho and Kante represent opposites, the constructive and destructive presence, the playmaker and the play-stopper. Thursday’s meeting with Manchester City should serve as a reminder that while Kante was arguably the outstanding player in the Premier League in successive seasons, he is probably not technical enough to be a Guardiola No. 6. The Catalan has tried to sign Jorginho, but not Kante. He prefers a passer to a tackler in his old position.

In the absence of the suspended Italy international, Kante took on the regista’s duties at Aston Villa on Sunday with the can-do mentality he has also brought to his more advanced role. He tried a series of cross-field balls. He made 12 long passes, almost eight times his seasonal average of 1.6 and more than three times Jorginho’s 3.7.

Yet he will never be the midfield metronome. His 90 passes against Villa approached Jorginho’s average of 96 in his last season at Napoli but came in a game when Chelsea had 74% possession. His highest average in a season, 63, fell well short of the 87 Fernandinho managed in the same position for Guardiola’s City, while his pass completion rate this season, at 83.6 percent, is his lowest since his Leicester days. It reflects an area of difference between Sarri and Lampard: the Englishman would rather get the ball forward.

And it is tempting to wonder if the demands of 4-3-3 has meant Kante has spent the last two seasons in systems designed for two very different types of midfielder: Andrea Pirlo or Lampard perhaps. They are shapes that require a No. 6 or a No. 8 when really, he is neither.

The paradox of Kante is that he covers the ground of two men but operates best in a central pair: 4-4-2 for Ranieri’s Leicester, 3-4-2-1 for Conte’s Chelsea, 4-2-3-1 for Didier Deschamps’ France. More pragmatic and more adaptable than Sarri, Lampard has occasionally used 3-4-2-1, but sometimes in Kante’s absence. Perhaps the new era of Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner will see 4-2-3-1, maybe with Mason Mount as a No. 10.

Yet thus far Kante’s formidable strengths have been diminished by his deployment in a different role, shunted away from the area where he regains the ball most frequently and efficiently.

And as he returns to the King Power on Sunday, it pits him against a man who has assumed his mantle. The FA Cup quarter-final should feature the midfielder with most tackles and interceptions in the Premier League this season: Wilfred Ndidi. It will be the old tackle king against the new.

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