Chelsea: Reality sets in for Sarri over Gonzalo Higuain’s readiness to produce

Maurizio Sarri has been having a belated get-to-know-you session with reality over the last 10 days. He now seems to understand Gonzalo Higuain is not the immediate answer to Chelsea’s striker problem he once thought.

Gonzalo Higuain – in case you hadn’t heard – knows Maurizio Sarri’s system very well. They played together, you know, back at Napoli. Higuain scored a few dozen goals (did you even watch Napoli that year, last year or any other year?) and thinks of Sarri as his “football father.” Turns out none of that is going to improve Chelsea’s season any time soon, which, in matchweek 28, means not much at all.

Maurizio Sarri said the 31-year old striker needs to improve his conditioning before he can have his full impact on the team. This is familiar ground for Sarri and Higuain. Higuain lost several pounds in his first month under Sarri at Napoli after a summer spent eating his feelings from the Champions League and Copa America. “You’re too lazy,” Sarri told him at their first meeting.

Sarri has softened his words a bit, at least in public. In his press conference on Friday, Sarri said:

"Now he needs more acceleration because now he is a little more resistant, but without the accelerations he had in Naples. So I think he needs to improve in the physical condition, and then he will be able to score. – Chelsea FC"

“Honey, does this dress make me look fat?” “No, sweetheart, just a little more resistant.”

Top banter from a guy sleeping on the couch. Anyway. The point is not what Sarri meant by “resistant,” but how he explicitly said Higuain is not accelerating like he once did and is below physical standards.

The Premier League magnifies any deficiencies in physicality a player brings from another league. This cuts to one of the main reasons why Maurizio Sarri and his methods are not finding a foothold in England, and why – despite the similarities in play and higher quality players – Chelsea are not standing out from the crowd the way Napoli did. The Premier League is a much more physical league. The pace of play and the speed of the individual players is – almost across the board – much greater in England than in Napoli. A large part of the uniqueness of Sarri’s Napoli sides was the quickness with which the players moved themselves and the ball. But what was the exception in Italy is the norm in England.

Even if Higuain was at his 2015/16 overall levels of physical conditioning, he would still only be at par for the Premier League. He would not be in the upper few percentiles necessary for a club vying for the top four, like Chelsea.

Of course, not only is Higuain not at his Napoli levels of conditioning, let alone a Premier League and Chelsea level of conditioning, he is also three years older than the last time he and Sarri worked together. Sarri surely had to account for the effects of his age when he pushed for the club to sign Higuain instead of keeping the younger and fully-conditioned Alvaro Morata or Michy Batshuayi, or to sign a younger Serie A player who could more readily develop the necessary physical capacities to go along with his goal scoring.

That younger Serie A player would be Krzysztof Piatek. Of the four strikers involved in January’s Sarri shuffle, Piatek has had by far the greatest immediate impact. Piatek has seven goals in eight appearances for AC Milan. Batshuayi and Morata each have one goal in five appearances for Crystal Palace and Atletico Madrid, respectively. Morata also has an assist. Higuain has two goals in seven games.

With Sunday’s fixture against Fulham being the least pressure and lowest-rated opponent Chelsea have face in over a month, Sarri may take the opportunity to rest Higuain to let him build the fitness he has been working on in training. Eden Hazard needs a rest as much as anyone, so Sarri could take a leap of faith and start Olivier Giroud. He could also try a player other than Hazard as the non-striker centre-forward. Or he could just do what he has done to so many other fatigued players this season, and play Hazard anyway.

However Fulham play in their first game under interim manager Scott Parker, the Blues would be better off with a true striker leading the line. If Sarri is this concerned about Higuain building fitness, this could be his best opportunity to either let Higuain recover from his sessions or split the duty with Giroud.

Like so much else about the Maurizio Sarri era, this latest crop of caveats, misgivings and maybe’s was predictable and predicted. A visibly out-of-shape 31-year old struggling to score in a less physical league with only one season three years ago to justify the move should have raised red flags instead of Chelsea’s interest.

In the absence of a technical director (481 days), someone – perhaps a physio or strength and conditioning coach – should have pointed out the gap between where Higuain was and where he would need to be. At the very least this would have helped Sarri, the club and the fans manage everyone’s expectations for Higuain, instead of this being the most recent edition of over-promoting the unrealistic hope of a plug-and-play solution from the Napoli days.

Unfortunately, Maurizio Sarri’s moments of clarity all set in after the January business was complete