Will Faulks, Chelsea News , external
New owners, new sporting directors, a new manager, new staff, and £1bn worth of new players. Everything at Chelsea has changed in the last 18 months, yet their defeat to West Ham on Sunday was so familiar it felt like a re-run of a number of matches in recent memory.
The owners have turned the club upside down and are somehow still faced with the on-field problems they have seen since the day they arrived.
Behdad Eghbali watched glumly from the stands at the London Stadium as the same old story played out in front of him. There was a confident start, chances created, chances missed, a couple of defensive errors, a game-changing injury, and then a gradual collapse in cohesion as substitutes were thrown on in desperation. Final result: Chelsea dominate, West Ham win.
Pundits at full-time said that on any other day Chelsea would have won. They had all of the chances and were caught out in a couple of moments - but ‘that’s football’. The problem with that is that on any other day, Chelsea don’t win this game. In fact, they lose games in precisely this fashion week after week.
There’s still a strong belief that Mauricio Pochettino is the man to change that - but, after a summer of excitement and promise, one can forgive fans for despairing as all hope of a fresh start evaporated.
The fans had every reason to think that they would be shown something new, and instead got a repeat of an episode they’ve seen too many times already.
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