Jorginho is moving out of Maurizio Sarri’s smoky shadow and into his own place at Stamford Bridge. Like many Chelsea players getting their first exposure to top-tier coaching in English football, he is benefitting greatly from the actual coaching provided by the development-focussed coaching staff.
One of the more inflammatory opinions you can hold in the company of ChelsTwit is that Jorginho is not in the same class as Andrea Pirlo or Sergio Busquets. That’s it. With no further statement on Jorginho’s ability or potential, and without comparing him to his predecessors at Chelsea like Nemanja Matic and Cesc Fabregas, simply denying his place among Pirlo and Busquets is enough to attract more anonymous troll accounts than your least favourite politicians.
No, Jorginho is no Pirlo and is no Busquets. In many situations Chelsea have been in this season and last, Matic and Fabregas in their current forms would have done a better job. He is still not worth £57 million. But if he continues to develop as he has this season under Frank Lampard, Jody Morris and Joe Edwards, he will take his place as one amongst equals with the rest of the Blues’ non-N’Golo Kante (who has no equals) midfielders. The Brazitalian is simply getting a later start than his peers.
Jorginho’s career was inextricable from Maurizio Sarri’s until Sarri took the first available opportunity leave Chelsea and his protege when Juventus came calling. Jorginho’s and Sarri’s individual trajectories mirrored those of both clubs under Sarri’s regime: one quick dose of novelty followed by numbing constancy.
Because Sarri never changed his pedagogy or game philosophy, a player who spent more than one season with him never had a chance to learn and grow. The circuits remained the same. The training stayed the same. The conditioning sessions remained the same (no weights, remember). And therefore the men involved remained the same.
If a player is never taught anything new or, better yet, given the opportunity to experiment and learn anything new via exposure to new scenarios and constraints, how can he be expected to grow?
The shift from Maurizio Sarri to Frank Lampard was probably more jarring for Jorginho than the move from Serie A to the Premier League. Sarri did everything in his power to replicate Napoli in west London, and despite the vast differences in playing style between the two leagues, Jorginho was insulated from many of those differences at the base of the midfield. Had he tried to adapt to those changes himself, Sarri may even have accused him of “trying to do to much,” as he did Jorginho’s partner, N’Golo Kante.
From day one, Lampard has demanded different kinds of effort than Sarri. The training sessions are scenario- and decision-based. Circuits are passe at Cobham and Stamford Bridge. Jorginho cannot make a pass or point or shout expecting a player to be in a certain place, because there is no “certain place” under Frank Lampard other than what the player’s on the pitch determine in accordance with the principles they train under.
Jorginho, like N’Golo Kante, Mason Mount, Mateo Kovacic, Billy Gilmour, Ross Barkley and the rest, has no levers to pull. He has to make a decision, execute and commit to it. He may even have to explain it in the game debrief and video review sessions.
He has made mistakes. Many, in all four stages of the game. But the other players have made mistakes, too. Mistakes are built into the learning process because there is no one “right” answer, just answers that work or don’t work to varying degrees.
Many of Chelsea’s players this have learned the game and prepared for the Premier League in similar tactical and pedagogical settings as they are in now. For players like Mount, Gilmour, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Fikayo Tomori and the rest of the academy graduates, it’s a natural continuation in much the same setting with the same people: Jody Morris, Joe Edwards and the rest of Frank Lampard’s promoted-from-within staff.
Many of them are learning how to play in the Premier League or the top-tier for the first time, but the fundamentals of what they are learning and how they are learning it are just what they are used to. And those development systems are geared towards the specifics of the Premier League.
The main difference between Jorginho and many of his teammates is his age. He is at a similar place in the learning curve as them. His years in Serie A give him a measure of experience, but the limited experiences he had in that league and in his one season under Sarri in the Premier League limit the amount of transference. Mount, Tomori and the others do not have as much first-tier experience, but they know the processes and the intentions.
The same things Morris and Edwards taught to their young charges at Cobham they are teaching to Jorginho now, and they are all learning the Premier League version together.
Comparing Jorginho’s path to the young academy graduates’ is like transferring credit from one major at one university to another, or using your work experience to place out of your prerequisite courses when you start university later in life. They are not one-to-one correspondences, and there will be shortcomings in either direction, but it’s a way of levelling out a 20-year old and a 27-year old who each bring different things to the table, but in many ways are at similar stages of their progress towards a common goal.
Jorginho has had the advantage of minimal competition for his spot since the season began. This has given him plenty of opportunity to learn on the job and earn the respect of his fans, teammates and his manager in the process.
As long as he keeps learning apace with the rest of the Blues, he will keep his spot in the XI and learn – along with the rest of us – what his ceiling really is. He won’t be Andrea Pirlo or Sergio Busquets, but he’ll certainly be more than Maurizio Sarri’s regista.