Before Chelsea start their Premier League season against Manchester United, here are a few light notes from around the opening days of the opening weekend.
We don’t want to overload you ahead of a wonderful day in club history, so take a quick trip through Chelsea-related results you may have missed in the last couple days.
1. Marseille 0 – 2 Reims
After a week in which a Chelsea manager showed the exact right way to deal with an outbreak of player power from one of his club’s veterans, a result in Ligue 1’s opening weekend reminded of a time when a different young Chelsea manager was much less adroit in handling his players. In both cases, Frank Lampard played a pivotal role.
Andre Villas-Boas lost his first game at the helm of Olympique Marseille. This was his first game in a “big five” league since he left Tottenham in 2013, his first time in Europe since leaving Zenit St. Petersburg in 2016 and his first anywhere since departing Shanghai SIPG in 2017. Over the last two years, he dabbled in off-road rabble racing, which is a more honest use of his time away than Pep Guardiola’s typically puffed up sabbaticals.
Villas-Boas comes back to football amid high expectations. Marseille have only finished out of Ligue 1’s top six once in the last seven seasons and were Europa League finalists two seasons ago.
2. West Ham 0 – 5 Manchester City
On the subject of Pep Guardiola and his merry band of marketers, Manchester City moved ahead of Liverpool on goal differential by crushing former City manager Manuel Pellegrini’s West Ham.
In standard but don’t ever mention it in polite company Guardiola fashion, City had 57% possession and 14 shots to West Ham’s five, but also out-fouled West Ham 13 to six. Pellegrini said City fouled his players “every time that we tried to arrive to their box,” and he is scarcely exaggerated. In the first half just over 10% of West Ham’s attacks ended in a Manchester City “tactical” foul.
Tactical fouls are fine. Taking a yellow card for the team is fine. Rough-housing and s**t-housing are part of the game, the English game in particular.
Just make sure you’re ready to deploy this game the next time some Guardiola fan boy (or a second-degree Guardiola fan boy, such as a Sarritologist) lambasts Jose Mourinho, Sam Allardyce, Antonio Conte, Roy Hodgson or – soon enough – Frank Lampard for anti-football, crimes against football or ugly football. If Pep Guardiola’s football is supposed to be the gold standard, it’s fair game to call out those times he lowers himself to the level of such vulgar impurity.
3. Charlton Athletic 3 – 1 Stoke City
Conor Gallagher was in the first group of players Frank Lampard spent back to London from the preseason tour, departing after starting the preseason opener against Bohemians. Like everyone else that day he only played 45 minutes, and despite leaving so soon after he made a positive impression on everyone who saw him play.
Chelsea sent Gallagher on his first loan to Charlton Athletic, and in his first start he scored his first professional goal in the 83′ against Stoke City.
4. AS Monaco 0 – 3 Lyon
We said it before, we’ve tweeted it regularly since the first time and we’ll continue saying it throughout this season even when calls go Chelsea’s way: at least until things get figured out in the most painful way possible (does the FA know any other way?), VAR will be a net negative on the Premier League.
VAR became a talking point of the Manchester City, and on Friday it had an even worse effect on ex-Blue Cesc Fabregas. Fabregas was initially awarded a yellow card for a clumsy swipe against an opponent’s leg. But upon review, the yellow became a red and Fabregas was off in the 30′.
The yellow card was a fair decision, and there was nothing in the play or the referee’s decision that warranted further review, unless you assume that all yellow cards are potential red card situations.
The dubiousness of the decision to review the foul was exceeded only by the decision to change the original call. If that counts as “clear and convincing” – and let’s not share a self-licking ice cream cone by talking about how that stricture applies to offsides calls – then words have no meaning and my verbomania counts for nothing.