Chelsea: Maurizio Sarri wants Hazard among top four, but not as false-nine

Maurizio Sarri gave the second-best interview of the year over the weekend, with Football Italia capturing the essence of Chelsea’s coach. He gave at least one important insight into his plans for this season and likely the next.

If Chelsea FC are looking for a new Twitter-based fan engagement contest (and trust me, they need all the help they can get), they should set up a contest whereby one lucky winner can come to Stamford Bridge and explain to Maurizio Sarri what Sarriball is. Despite all the tweets gushing over videos of every string of four or more passes, with the occasional “You never saw this during Conte’s suffer-ball!” for good measure, Sarri has no idea what people are talking about.

Then again, neither do the people doing the tweeting.

“The whole Sarriball thing amuses me. I don’t go on social media, but I did see the fans post these videos with the most passes. If I have to be honest, the Chelsea fans aren’t even sure what Sarriball means,” Sarri told Corriere dello Sport. “They invented this term, pronounce it all in one word and carry on. It’s very funny.”

That comment, more than any statistic or result, paves the road to our hearts.

More relevant to his actual coaching of the club, Sarri talked about the squad’s progress to this point and his perspective on some players. Sarri confirmed that Chelsea have at most 70% of what they need, and are even further away from what they will someday produce under his tutelage. He praised Eden Hazard, but not unconditionally.

Sarri seems almost fretful that Hazard will not reach his full potential. The coach implied Hazard does not have the ruthless intensity necessary to become one of the three or four best in the world. While many people cite the importance of Eden Hazard being happy and joyful in his play and his team’s tactics – as exemplified with Maurizio Sarri’s wide-open, offence-driven system – Sarri thinks this could be the root of the problem.

"The problem is he plays to enjoy himself and at times doesn’t realise the importance of moving from fun to reaping the rewards… He needs to lift his head up, look around and realise there’s a whole world in front of him that he can dictate with his feet for the good of the collective and not just the individual."

In short, Hazard could mercilessly run the table in nearly any game Chelsea will ever play. To leave the debate and enter the pantheon with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, this is what Sarri expects him to do.

Sarri will keep Eden Hazard as the free-roving No. 10 for the foreseeable future – at least the balance of this season and likely next. Sarri admitted he considered shifting Hazard to the false-nine as he did with Dries Mertens at Napoli, but instead decided to keep faith with his strikers. “We need to believe in Olivier Giroud and Alvaro Morata.”

This is an important vote of confidence for those strikers, especially the perpetually confidence-starved and maligned Morata. The two will maintain their competition for the starting spot, but their position will not be written out of the playbook. They and Maurizio Sarri will have to determine how they will support the tactics and how the tactics will serve them.

For as much good as both centre-forwards do beyond scoring, they need to score. For themselves and for the team, they need goals. By committing to them, Sarri is taking an additional level of responsibility for their output.

Sarri’s last impression of a true striker is Gonzalo Higuain, whom he describes as “a goal machine, a systematic and automatic jackpot.” Higuain has his career-best season under Sarri in the coach’s first year at Napoli. “[W]e understood each other so well. It was perfect synchronicity.”

The challenge for Sarri, then, is to develop some level of rapport with his strikers, even if they will never reach the level with him that Higuain did. Sarri will have to adjust his tactics for Giroud and Morata, since “the Higuain role” will not work for them any more than the “Hamsik” or “Allan” roles will work for Ross Barkley or N’Golo Kante. He needs these Chelsea players to be their best. The strikers do not need to replicate Higuain’s 30+ goal season. They simply need to give the team more options and take some of the pressure off of Eden Hazard to score all of Chelsea’s crucial goals.

That is, unless Sarri wants the pressure on Hazard so he can realize his utmost potential. Of the two strikers and Hazard, only Olivier Giroud seems to thrive in high-pressure situations.

Maurizio Sarri is confident Eden Hazard will stay with Chelsea for two more seasons. This gives both men enough time to validate Sarri’s notion that Hazard will be at his best with a kinder-gentler approach from the coach, but with Hazard not taking the kindness and gentleness with him out onto the pitch.