Chelsea’s B-squad – with an assist from 10-man PAOK – played a more effective form of Sarrismo than the the best XI often does. How they went about it highlighted some of the tensions pulling on the team.
Robert F. Kennedy (American politician, b. Nov 1925 – not Robert Kenedy Nunes Nascimento, footballer, b. February 1996) had no time for people who inquired about things as they were, preferring instead to ask why things couldn’t be as he dreamed. One has to wonder, then, what Kennedy (two n’s) would think about Maurizio Sarri. The Chelsea coach does not seem much interested in wondering why things are or why they can’t be as he dreams. He prefers to say “Thou shalt, thou will, thou must!” to the world as it is, hoping it will conform to his wants.
Sarri’s comments on N’Golo Kante after the loss to Tottenham are for now the most glaring example of his rigidity in matching his players to his tactics. How he responds to the win over PAOK, though, could be a more subtle and long-lasting indication.
Let’s quickly review Friday’s caveats to that win. The game had no implication for either side, PAOK played 83 minutes with 10 men and Chelsea were at home. Even with the B-squad and an 18-year old on the wing, Chelsea should have played as they did.
The Blues’ pass, possession and expected goal (xG) charts were all pure Sarrismo. Cesc Fabregas made 127 passes from the playmaker position – 40 more than the next player. Fabregas and the wingers were top three players in the xG chains, as Sarri wants. Fabregas connected two nearly symmetric batteries of four players – a centre back, full back, midfielder and winger – on each side of the pitch, with the centre backs at the base.
But at the same time, the game moved more at a Fabregas pace than a Sarri-Jorginho pace. Fabregas picked rather than pinged his passes. He saved his best passes for those xG chains, sending immaculate long balls over the top for Pedro and Olivier Giroud. He had seven key passes and 17 long balls. Jorginho’s most this season were three key passes and eight long balls, both coming in the 0-0 draw against West Ham.
Pedro shared the lead with Callum Hudson-Odoi with five shots, and the Spaniard was second with six key passes. Willian – Sarri’s lately preferred option over Pedro – has only matched those stats once this season, and has not had more than three shots in any other game.
Chelsea used their possession and press as their first line of defence, per Sarrismo. Gary Cahill stayed forward at one point in the second half long enough to keep the ball under Chelsea’s control. He actually preserved possession twice in that sequence, the second being a few touches before Hudson-Odoi’s goal. But Cahill also made two last-ditch tackles to ensure Kepa Arrizabalaga did not face any shots on target.
Hudson-Odoi capped an already incredible night with an assist on the fourth goal. He served Alvaro Morata the same pass Cesar Azpilicueta served Morata all last season, with the exact same end result: a headed goal for the striker.
Remind yourself of the caveats and then let’s review. Two of Chelsea’s four goals – Olivier Giroud’s second and Morata’s – came from distinctly non-Sarrismo passes: an aerial long ball just off the diagonal from the centre of the pitch, and an aerial cross from where the full back’s and winger’s domains overlap.
The pass to Giroud – like the pass to Pedro, and the other 125 – came from an out-of-favour player who sets a slower tempo but produces more directly effective results.
Pedro sent that pass into orbit rather than into the net. Otherwise he made the sort of direct runs and vertical off-the-ball movement that is necessary for Sarrismo, and complemented it with the team lead in shots. His partner on the other wing shared that lead and showed a similar style, especially after the move to the right, complemented by even better crosses.
Yet both of those players are out of favour in the Premier League XI for Willian, who can run any Chelsea counter-attack to a halt, makes mazy runs off the ball that go nowhere and will dribble the ball out of bounds or out of possession before making a cross.
Maurizio Sarri wants a defence dependable enough to keep seven players high up the pitch, and wants those defenders to have a hand in the offence. Yet he plays a centre back who is famously unreliable at defending and has never scored more than two goals in a league campaign. Sitting on the bench is one of the league’s most defensively reliable if unflashy defenders, one who scored six goals two seasons ago.
And then there’s the whole N’Golo Kante thing.
This is not about whether Maurizio Sarri is getting things wrong. This is about him paying no regard to the world – his players, his opponents, the Premier League – as it is in his attempts to strong-arm the world into what he wants. He expects people and events to bend to his will: N’Golo Kante will be a box-to-box midfielder because Chelsea do not need a defensive midfielder. Jorginho is a more effective playmaker than Cesc Fabregas. Willian is the starting winger even if he is nearly the antithesis of the ideal winger.
Sarri is certainly not deluded into thinking these things. It’s that they must be true because he expects them to be so.
My colleague Travis touched on the core of this issue as it pertains to Sarrismo last week. Maurizio Sarri is often compared to Pep Guardiola. They may have some stylistic points in common, but they lack a common philosophy because Sarrismo is not a philosophy, nor is it based on one.
Pep Guardiola has a philosophy for how the game of football should be played. For a given league in a given year, that philosophy informs the system he builds. Within that system, he utilizes the players on hand to develop the tactics.
As Travis points out, Guardiola changed his tactics and his system in his first two years at Manchester City. But he did not change his philosophy.
Guardiola could dress his players in a blank grey kit with face masks and arrange them in a 3-5-2 or a W-M or some arcane Hungarian formation from the middle chapters of Inverting the Pyramid, and you would still recognize their play as a Pep Guardiola side. Because it’s not the players and it’s not the formation and it’s not the tactics and it’s only barely the system. It’s the philosophy that even casual watchers can recognize as uniquely his, and more sophisticated watchers can see etched onto every one of his trophies.
Managers at various levels of accomplishment have philosophies at parallel levels of refinement. It is not the domain of Pep Guardiola, contemporaries of his like Jurgen Klopp, nor fountainheads like Helenio Herrera.
Sarrismo as we know it from Napoli and 13 Premier League matchweeks at Chelsea is a formation and a set of tactics. It is not a philosophy, and is barely a system. That is why we see N’Golo Kante as a box-to-box midfielder and this tension from which a B-side outshines the best XI by producing a near-perfect execution through near-antithetical methods.
Somewhat remarkably, none of this may matter to Sarri’s time at Chelsea. The Blues have won trophies while held together by much less than what they have now. The normal course of events at Stamford Bridge could catch up to Sarri before these esoteric tensions affect the final outcome or Roman Abramovich’s bottom line.
Abramovich is much less interested in asking of himself “Why?” or “Why not?” than asking his coach “What have you done for me lately?”