Some honesty is refreshing, but not when that honesty involves a manager publicly feeding his best players into a woodchipper. Chelsea are back to having a manager who understands the strategic value of communications.
If you’re here, you’re a few steps up the cognitive ladder from people who get their Chelsea opinions reaffirmed in the Echo chambers of Twitter. So you might not know that we kicked up a little bit of a dust devil with a tweet that summarized one aspect of yesterday’s article about Jorginho, namely, the Brazitalian’s hissy fit in the 54′.
A common response was citing Frank Lampard’s comments about Jorginho, often followed by some challenge of “You don’t think you know better than Frank, do you?”
First, we strongly deplore all logical fallacies. Avoid arguments from authority. They’re every bit as tedious as the second-most common logical fallacy in our mentions: the “no true Scotsman,” or, in this case “no true Chelsea fan,” as though impugning our interest in the club will change our minds; or as though restricting our opinions based on our fandom is somehow a healthy approach. I guess the small miracle is no one has invoked Godwin’s Law.
Second, this goes directly to what we said earlier this month about how Maurizio Sarri’s boot-lickers will end the season looking like Shar-Peis from furrowing their brows in vain attempts to understand what Frank Lampard is doing.
Among the basic management lessons Sarri didn’t learn at the bank but Lampard learned from his 11 Chelsea managers and every other manager he studied along the way is praise your players in public, always, unfailingly. If a reporter asks you about a player who had a poor game, you say something like “We all need to improve. It’s a long season, and it’s a team sport. We can all do better, we have to. For the fans.” If a reporter asks about a player who had a great game, then you make it personal “We all have great belief in him. He’s a key member of this team and will be for some years to come.”
This is different from the raw bulls***tery of Pep Guardiola saying Phil Foden is the most talented player he’s ever coached. That’s just Guardiola performing for the cameras, like his locker room homage to Tony Adams. When a manager like Lampard praises his players, he’s being a proper manager. It’s strategic communications. It’s not about what he says, it’s about what he’s doing. That’s the message – not the words. Maybe it’s what he thinks, maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter.
Finally, going back to the Jorginho hissy fit, another common response was: “This is what leaders do. He’s organizing the side, and he has a right to get angry when they are not getting into place. It’s like what John Terry would do!”
Again, this is applying the Sarri framework to the Lampard era. Defences have to be structured. They only work when they are structured, whether on set pieces or from open play. When Terry or Gary Cahill collared their teammates to get them into place on defence, that is necessary leadership and organization in a stage of the game that demands it.
Under Maurizio Sarri, the offence was organized the same way. It was every bit as structured and rigid as a defence would be under any other coach. Jorginho could move the players around like chess pieces because there were, in fact, predefined positions and movements for every player at every time.
The offence has no such structure under Lampard. Chelsea’s offence, and to various extents their transitions to and from offence, is based on decision-making. Jorginho can’t order someone into a position because there is no “right” position. The “right” position is the one that comes off, and that ends up being dependent on everyone: the player making the run, the player making the space, the player making the pass and everyone else. Jorginho was bossing his teammates at a moment when there is no bossing to be done, because that implies a rigidity that no longer exists.
This was the main difference between Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri. Conte used much the same circuit-based training and game play as Sarri (why do you think Conte was getting a 90 minute workout directing traffic from the touchline?). However, Conte used the precise circuits to advance the play into the final third. Once Chelsea were set up in possession, they had creative flexibility for runs by Eden Hazard, crosses or drifts into the box from Marcos Alonso, or whatever it is Pedro does at any given moment.
Lampard, building off of coaches like Jose Mourinho, extends that decision-making empowerment to the rest of the non-defending game states. Defences are structured, offences are not.
This takes more time to teach and will never be perfected, which is wonderful because it means the Blues will never hit a ceiling, and certainly not in September like last year. It also means that guy pointy-shouting the orders looks doubly the fool, not just for how he is doing, but simply because he is.