Chelsea FC Defeat Norwich City: Key Takeaways
Attacking Improvements
The biggest indication of this improvement is best highlighted in this fact: between Chelsea’s 2-0 victory against Aston Villa (which incidentally was the Blues last win in the league and Diego Costa’s last goal) and Saturday’s victory against Norwich, Diego Costa had only managed 3 shots at goal (only one on target) in all competitions. Against Norwich, he equalled his shots tally for that period and doubled the number of efforts on target. And the end result…a goal! Although the Costa of last season would probably have netted a hat-trick.
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Now it would be easier to say that Costa played well and leave it at that. But unfortunately, save for Pedro, who managed to out do his best Pedro imitation (I still have trouble believing he was groomed in the La Masia academy), Diego Costa was Chelsea’s worst attacking player on the day! He managed to fluff his lines on two occasions when scoring would have been easier, and only scored due to the quick thinking of Cesc Fabregas.
Most of the credit should go to Jose Mourinho for finally getting Costa to play to his strength (prowling in and around the 18-yard box), giving him much needed support (by playing Hazard more centrally as a second striker) and finally playing a pacy left-footed player at left-back (although I have to say that the Blues had John Terry to thank for covering Kenedy’s naivety in defence).
Costa clearly benefited from the added support from Hazard as the Belgian took a lot of attention away from him. The fact that he didn’t have to play with his back to goal meant he was able to focus on finding spaces to exploit in the box, which he managed to do on five occasions.
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