Chelsea players paint a picture of Maurizio Sarri’s inability to level with them

Patterns define the manager, on and off the pitch. Maurizio Sarri’s pattern of not being straight-forward and honest is emerging from one interview after another with Chelsea players.

Maybe Danny Drinkwater actually received Maurizio Sarri’s most preferential treatment. Sarri told Drinkwater flat out in August that Drinkwater would never play for him at Chelsea because “he is not suitable to my system, to my way of playing… He’s a good player and he’s able to play in a 4‑4‑2 or a 4‑2‑3‑1 very well. But he’s not suitable for me. I cannot do anything [for him].”

Before we go on, let’s pause and ingest (your choice: inject, snort, smoke or chew) these words from Sarri, the manager whose dim-bulb admirers still insists would rather improve players than buy players; relishes the chance to work with who he has rather than who he wants; and makes every player around him better. Wait for it. There it is. Exhale.

We only have Sarri’s word to go on regarding this conversation with Drinkwater. Drinkwater has not spoken out about his experience at Chelsea FC in the year of Sarri. Legal counsel tend to advise you to stay quiet at incidents like Drinkwater had in April.

Fortunately, many other Chelsea players are not under warrant and are free to speak openly. Their stories are remarkably consistent.

“He told me some things that I knew were not going to be as he had said,” Alvaro Morata tactfully put it. A less artful way of saying it would be “I knew he was feeding me a pile of horse feathers.”

“At one point I went to see him [Sarri] when I did not understand his choices. He gave me explanations… But when you bring in a player in January it’s hard to put him back on the bench and disown him.” That’s Olivier Giroud describing the bait-and-switch “explanations” around the January transfer window with the departure of Morata and arrival of Gonzalo Higuain.

“A new coach came with a player that for him was like his son… For whatever reason it was impossible for me even if I was better, or someone else is better, to play every match.” Cesc Fabregas. “Whatever reason.”

We’d have a pull quote from Gary Cahill’s May interview, but The Telegraph’s initial reporting on the matter in February casts a wider net. Per Matt Law, “as is the case with a number of his fringe players, Sarri has barely spoken to Cahill since arriving at Stamford Bridge despite allowing him to keep the club captaincy. Long-serving Chelsea staff have been surprised by the treatment of a player [like Cahill].”

The picture emerging from these quotes is of Maurizio Sarri not telling players what they need to hear, not even telling them what they want to hear, but telling them only what he wants to say, which may be nothing at all.

Alvaro Morata, probably to his detriment as a professional footballer (certainly as one in England), is well-attuned to emotional cues from those around him. His BS detector was going off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl, and with good reason.

If it was just him, it would be easy to brush aside his interview as the usual Morata whinging with side orders of resentment and a desire to make his new club look even better.

But no one has ever accused Olivier Giroud or Gary Cahill of being weak or fragile in any sense, physically, mentally or emotionally. Cesc Fabregas has worked with nearly every top manager of the last 15 years in some of the most high-pressure environments football has ever known. He has no reason to exaggerate the situation or make himself out to be a victim. Fabregas and Morata came up through the more elite side of development ball, whereas Giroud and Cahill did things the “blue collar” way until landing at London’s money clubs.

These men have the range of professional experience to know what is normal and what is expected in the interactions between manager and player in top-level football.

That experience is utterly unnecessary to grasp what is wrong here. The night manager of a Taco Bell in Lubbock, Texas, will have a better command of workplace communications than Maurizio Sarri does. Yesterday’s gorditas are not going to walk themselves to the dumpster. The night manager needs to tell the new guy to do it, and if those instructions are not crystal clear, the new guy will find a way to slag off the job. And since the night manager doesn’t want to have to tell the new guy to do it every day, he’ll find some way to communicate that standing order.

Party A communicates tasks, expectations, assessment criteria and outcomes to Party B. Happens in fast food and sports. Apparently such basics are not part of the Italian banking industry.

Maurizio Sarri dodged the delivery of unpleasant news to players he did not take a shine to and thought he did not need.

Rather than tell Morata and Giroud the truth, he deceived or evaded them. And they knew it. After deliberating about whether to let Gary Cahill retain the captaincy, he let him do so and promptly ghosted him for the rest of the season. Cahill, as The Telegraph point out, was hardly the only one to realize something was amiss. Sarri left it to Fabregas to figure out “whatever reason” why he would always be behind Jorginho in the depth chart. Fabregas pieced things together easily enough.

Sarri had least at the decency to tell Danny Drinkwater lasciate ogni speranza. Perhaps it was because Drinkwater was the only player of Sarri’s unfavourables who did not have an intimidating resume.

Drinkwater merely had a Premier League title with Leicester City and an FA Cup with Chelsea. Sarri might some day match that total. He will never match the trophy cases of Cahill, Morata, Fabregas or Giroud. Sarri could look at Drinkwater almost as an equal, despite at the time trailing Drinkwater 2-0 in the trophy department..

But Sarri has an odd way of reserving his worst invective for the players he needs the most. He called Alvaro Morata mentally fragile in a press conference in December, just a couple weeks after he delivered relentless criticism of N’Golo Kante following the Tottenham loss. At the time, Morata was still Sarri’s top choice for striker since he did not trust Olivier Giroud and Gonzalo Higuain was still a month away.

Sarri said Eden Hazard was too selfish, yet would be nowhere without him. He knew he needed Cahill in the locker room, but had no earthly clue how to use him the way Antonio Conte used John Terry.

Maybe Sarri is just more comfortable in front of the cameras than he is in front of his own players, especially one-on-one. The cameras are anonymous, involve no real interaction and no one in the room will challenge him for fear of losing access (or being on the receiving end of a misogynist remark. Remember when he did that?).

None of that not be a surprise from a football coach who has a superstition about stepping foot on football pitches. Why expect him to be any more open to talking to football players?