What is wrong with Thomas Tuchel's Chelsea and can Tottenham capitalise?
Thomas Tuchel cut a dejected figure on the sidelines in Chelsea’s 1-1 draw with Brighton, almost as if he expected his team to huff and puff to another disappointing result.
And well he might: Chelsea face the very real danger of being pulled into a top four race having won just one of their last seven Premier League matches. Only triumph in the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup has held back crisis talk.
But as the postponements pile up it is slowly dawning on us all that 2021/22 is another season with an asterisk, another year of heavy Covid-19 interruption that ought to elicit sympathy for the plight of Premier League managers.
Tiredness effecting Chelsea
As Tuchel said after the Brighton game, his players are simply exhausted.
Chelsea have played twice a week for three months straight and, through a quirk of how the postponements have fallen, have played four more Premier League matches than this weekend’s opponents Tottenham Hotspur.
The tactical battle at Stamford Bridge will be no less important than usual, and in fact Tuchel’s introduction of a new formation makes it of particular interest, but there is no doubt the biggest factor on Sunday will be fitness and psychology.
In a derby game likely to be played at full throttle, as both Tuchel and Antonio Conte demand, Spurs hold a clear advantage simply by having fresher legs.
On top of that, Conte ought to have learnt a lesson from the back-to-back defeats to Chelsea in the Carabao Cup this month.
Tuchel's new flexible system
In both games Chelsea deployed a new hybrid 4-2-2-2/3-5-2 formation in the first sign of Tuchel finally letting go of the 3-4-2-1, which had become stale in recent months as opponents worked out its strengths and weaknesses. The 4-2-2-2/3-5-2 is considerably more difficult to track.
Starting with a back four, with narrow sets of twos giving Chelsea a shape that blocks the middle of the pitch and allows for hard pressing of the opposition midfielders, Tuchel’s side swing into a back three when right-back Cesar Azpilicueta becomes a third centre-back, Hakim Ziyech moves from the ten position to right wing-back, and Mason Mount becomes a third central midfielder.
Fluidity and unpredictability is the key; Mount floats vertically to stitch together the midfield and the strikers while Ziyech drifts out wide to help the build-up phase before darting back into attacking midfield alongside Mount when play is in the final third.
Chelsea are moving back and forth between the shapes seamlessly, and certainly in the cup games it left Spurs confounded.
But Conte did adapt and the second match was closer, thanks to the Italian moving from a 3-4-3 to a 3-5-2. By adding an extra central midfielder and dropping Spurs a little deeper, he managed to close off a lot of the space in which Ziyech and Mount had roamed so freely in the first leg. That is undoubtedly the main lesson Conte has learnt, and it should ensure we have a calmer and more even contest on Sunday.
In fact, the pace of the game probably won’t be very high. Chelsea’s exhaustion in the draw with Brighton showed that a 4-2-2-2/3-5-2 still becomes easy to track if tiredness limits the movement of the attacking players, while Spurs may also lack sharpness without Eric Dier’s sweeping diagonals into the advancing wing-backs - a key component of the Conte system.
How can Spurs beat Chelsea?
Aside from that, Tottenham’s main threat is sharp, vertical counters through the centre of the pitch.
Stephen Bergwijn’s dramatic late double at Leicester City might have proved Spurs are improving as a calculated counter-attacking force, and it might have proved they will battle fiercely to the end, but Chelsea’s defence won’t collapse like Leicester’s did.
The imperious N’Golo Kante and Matteo Kovacic, along with the brilliant compactness of Tuchel’s off-the-ball shape, should deny Spurs many chances like those at the King Power.
In other words, with Conte working out Tuchel and with Chelsea already keeping two clean sheets against Spurs in 2022, it should be a very tight game with few big chances for either side.
The spotlight, then, is on the battle between two supposedly unhappy strikers who will need to be on form to turn half-chances into something more serious.
Romelu Lukaku is playing very poorly, although in his defence Callum Hudson-Odoi was a strange choice for a strike partner against Brighton.
Chelsea played with more urgency once Kai Havertz was on the pitch, and should the German start on Sunday Lukaku will be in better shape to make a difference.
Harry Kane, meanwhile, has four goals in his last seven games in all competitions and assisted Bergwijn’s winner on Wednesday. Of the two, Kane is more likely to come up with the goods.
Reguilon could be key
The game’s most intriguing battle is down Tottenham’s left, where Sergio Reguilon has shouldered a lot of creative responsibility due to the inept final product of Emerson Royal on the other side.
Spurs work hard to pull the play one way before switching to the other, and it will be interesting to see if Chelsea’s hybrid formation – and the complicated position this puts both Azpilicueta and Ziyech in – allows Reguilon room to cross.
But this is not a game likely to be defined by either side’s tactics. One of these teams is at a particularly low ebb, deeply fatigued by fixture congestion and a rut from which they cannot escape. The other is floating on air after a remarkable comeback victory saw them gain a crucial upper hand in the top-four race.
There are eight points between Chelsea and Tottenham but the latter has four games in hand.
Conte’s team will know they have the chance to pounce on a wounded animal and pull them into a scrap for the Champions League places. The smell of blood should give Tottenham the impetus to deepen Chelsea’s misery on Sunday.
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