Maurizio Sarri needed only one sentence to explain why Danny Drinkwater has no place under him at Chelsea. Sarri could ensure future players do not meet such an end by having some clear conversations with the technical director. Oh wait.
Maurizio Sarri’s squad selection sometimes seems like that old dating show “Singled Out.” Can you play in a midfield three? If so, you can stay for the next round. Otherwise, you join the parade of shame past the coach on your way out the door. Danny Drinkwater, though, took the option for a second chance at love, which let the summer window shut and keep him at Chelsea and nowhere near the bench for the first half of the season.
Sarri said he has a “tactical problem with the midfielders.” Drinkwater is fundamentally incompatible with Sarrismo because “he is suitable for a midfield two because with a three he is not really a central midfielder or suitable for centre right or centre left.”
Chelsea did not have the best reasons or clearest plan for buying Drinkwater in 2017. Perhaps they felt the only way to improve on having N’Golo Kante in a Premier League-winning midfield would be to reunite him with his partner from the previous season’s Premier League-winning midfield. Of course, they bought Tiemoue Bakayoko for a similar purpose. Bakayoko and Drinkwater would always be redundant, but at least Antonio Conte had a place for someone like them in his midfields.
The Drinkwater purchase is the mirror image of buying Jorginho. The former is a player who could more or less have some level of role in a variety of formations under an array of coaches without being really necessary to anyone’s needs. The latter is a player with an eponymous role in his coach’s eponymous system at two clubs.
Both, then, represent the same dangers. First, the lack of a technical director setting and pursuing the grand strategy of ambition, football tactics, coaches and players.
Second, even when the Blues had a technical director (408 days ago, for those keeping track at home), there was a lack of communication between him and the coach. Michael Emenalo apparently did not think it was necessary to explain or justify his transfer decisions. The club signed players and it was up to the coach to figure what, if anything, he was to do with them.
Third, there was no logical progression from one coach to the next. Availability and desire ruled the day, irrespective of the need to connect one coach’s style to the next. Teams do not just seamlessly shift from Antonio Conte’s style of play to Maurizio Sarri’s, not without a long and uncomfortable adjustment period on the pitch (which they have handled reasonably well so far) and off.
This last has been the death blow for Danny Drinkwater. If Chelsea wanted to adopt Maurizio Sarri’s philosophy of football as a matter of club identity, they needed to set the stage for him. They needed a transition manager to move Chelsea out of the Jose Mourinho legacy and Antonio Conte shadow towards Sarri’s approach. The transition manager would work under the auspices of the technical director, who would use those transition years to move players in and out of the club as necessary.
If you don’t believe this is possible or how clubs operate any more, I refer you to the top of the Premier League table. Manchester City and, to a slightly lesser extent, Liverpool preheated the oven for Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp (sorry for the metaphor – Christmas cookies on the brain).
Drinkwater is precisely the sort of player who would be eased out respectfully and professionally during that transition. Chelsea have played with various forms of a two-midfield system for a long time. Maurizio Sarri is completely uninterested in such things. A three-man midfield with well-defined roles and one role reserved for one particular player are the core of his system. Neither of these facts are secrets, and Chelsea should have not been surprised by his choices.
Drinkwater would have gone as far as he could have with the club during this period, and then left. He would have played throughout, keeping his match-sharpness and his transfer value intact, injury permitting.
Maurizio Sarri should not have been the one to deal with Danny Drinkwater’s departure. Sarri should not have had to marginalize Drinkwater because the Englishman should not have been at the club when Sarri arrived. Whether you think he should have ever been at the club is a different conversation. But once Chelsea knew Sarri was the next coach, they should have started getting the club ready for him. That includes sales as well as purchases.
The entire Danny Drinkwater saga is another completely avoidable embarrassment for Chelsea FC. Of course, there’s no one to hang the embarrassment on because Michael Emenalo is gone, the coaches have turned over and the rest of the transfer staff is an anonymous Borg.
Perhaps the transfer ban will be FIFA’s gift to Chelsea, sparing them the opportunity to make another round of mistakes. They will still have plenty to do dealing with the mistakes already germinating, like what they will do with Jorginho when the next coach comes in and reverts to a two-man midfield.