If you have ever tried building a house of cards, you know that every piece matters.
One wrongly placed card might collapse the whole structure, even if it’s the one at the very top.
Perhaps that’s how new Chelsea head coach Mauricio Pochettino feels after seeing his side collect only five points from their first six league games of the season.
Judging this team solely based on their results without taking in the performances into the equation is unfair — The Athletic has laid out how they haven’t been as bad as the league table suggests.
However, the last piece in Chelsea’s house of cards is the main problem, and that piece is goalscoring.
In their six games, Chelsea have underperformed their non-penalty expected goals (npxG) by a margin of 5.7 — scoring five non-penalties from a non-penalty expected goals figure of 10.7.
Their matches against West Ham United (3-1 away defeat), Nottingham Forest (1-0 home loss) and Bournemouth (goalless away draw) followed the same pattern: start as the better team, miss chances you should score, game takes a different turn for one reason or another. And against Aston Villa at Stamford Bridge yesterday (Sunday), it pretty much happened again.
As funny as this might sound, Chelsea did go in with a clear attacking plan for trying to get the better of Unai Emery’s side, but the execution of it failed them once more.
From their first attack in the game, Chelsea were looking to make runs in behind Villa.
In this example, it’s Enzo Fernandez making the late burst forward and signalling for the ball to be played into the space ahead of him…
… but Villa’s offside trap works as intended, and the Argentina midfielder is caught out:
Going direct to try to beat Villa’s attempts to catch opponents offside is an approach that many Premier League clubs have used, with varying degrees of success. But Chelsea had an additional idea, other than just trying to find a runner in behind Emery’s defensive line.
Instead of just having one runner going in behind, Chelsea’s attack frequently employed two of them making different runs — one to manipulate Villa’s offside line, the other to use that advantage to attack the space.
Here’s an example of how that worked: with Fernandez on the ball near the centre circle, Chelsea’s right-back Malo Gusto is advancing out wide with Raheem Sterling in a narrower position:
The England forward starts his run before Gusto sets off, to force Villa’s back line to drop a couple of yards deeper — keeping Sterling offside, but maintaining a close distance to him…
…which means Gusto is onside when he makes that second run. The problem is that Fernandez doesn’t play the pass to the Frenchman:
In simple terms, the first runner is a decoy to either force one of the Villa defenders to drop deeper, allowing Chelsea’s second runner to be onside, or to get the whole back line to move up, giving that second runner more space to attack.
In this example, Conor Gallagher makes the first run while Nicolas Jackson is waiting in the centre:
Gallagher’s run forces Matty Cash to move back a couple of yards, and that’s exactly when Jackson starts the second run…
… because at that moment Cash having gone with Gallagher is tilting Villa’s defensive line…
… which means Jackson is onside when Mykhailo Mudryk plays a line-splitting pass for the Senegalese forward:
It’s a great opportunity, but Jackson fails to beat goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez:
In our next example, Chelsea are attacking down their right, with Sterling now hugging the touchline. As Fernandez plays the ball up to Jackson, Gusto starts his forward movement from deeper on that wing…
… but the first runner here is Sterling, whose positioning forces Cash, highlighted in the centre circle, to move up to maintain Villa’s offside line. This gives Gusto an advantage: the defensive line is moving forwards, while he is attacking from a non-offside position.
The Chelsea right-back sprints over halfway…
… and his run is found by Jackson:
Once the ball has gone ahead of him, Sterling makes a diagonal run into the penalty area to offer Gusto another passing option…
… but the pass towards him and the arriving Gallagher is intercepted by John McGinn:
Chelsea’s attack had the right idea going into this game, but the final execution failed them time and time again.
Here, after Jackson’s initial run forces Villa’s back line to move up, Gusto plays the ball to Fernandez…
… which is the trigger for Sterling to readjust his position for the second run:
Continuing with the same attacking pattern, Fernandez finds the second runner in Sterling…
… but once more the Chelsea attackers fail to turn the situation into a goal. This attack saw Sterling flagged offside, although had he put the ball in the net VAR may well have overturned that decision.
Even when Chelsea were down to 10 men for the final half an hour, this attacking approach provided them with two chances to get back into the game after Ollie Watkins gave Villa a 73rd-minute lead.
On the first, Sterling’s movement forces Cash to move up to maintain Villa’s offside line, but the real target is the second runner — Ben Chilwell out wide:
Similar to the Gusto example from the first half, Cash moves up to play Sterling offside and Chilwell capitalises with his late run. Cole Palmer then finds his left-back in space…
… but the theme of missed chances continues with Chilwell’s shot being saved by Martinez.
On the second occasion, Sterling tries to get in behind the Villa defence with Axel Disasi — having moved from central defence to right-back following Gusto’s dismissal — acting as the second runner.
The England international’s movement forces the Villa defence to hold their ground to try to play him offside, which benefits Disasi’s late run out wide:
Palmer then finds the Frenchman…
… but the eventual shot isn’t even on target.
Against Villa, Chelsea’s execution repeatedly failed them despite the team having the correct attacking ideas, and, looking at their upcoming run of games, with fixtures including Brighton (twice), Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester City, Newcastle and Manchester United across the next 10 matches, they need to fix their goalscoring woes as soon as possible.
Right now, though, while the ideas are good, the implementation of them is not. Even in a stable house of cards, sometimes it’s the last piece which makes it crumble.
