Three Chelsea managers, present and past, were in action on Sunday. Here are a few things we learned from Frank Lampard, Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri.
A few hours after Chelsea dispatched Southampton, their two most recent managers squared off in the Derby d’Italia. Antonio Conte’s Inter Milan entered the game with a two point lead over Maurizio Sarri’s Juventus, but the latter walked out atop Serie A via goals from Paulo Dybala and, would you believe it, super sub Gonzalo Higuain.
1. Player quality trumps tactics and organization
Tactics and organization – the X’s, O’s and arrows, all the numerical expressions of how a team lines up on the pitch, discourses on movement patterns – can explain how a team approached a game and reveal why things played out a certain way, but at the end of the day they play only a secondary role in explaining the outcome. The quality of the players in the game is the most reliable determinant and explanation for who won and who lost.
Players set the ceiling for a team. The manager can only meet or lower that ceiling, no matter how astute his tactics and comprehensive his training.
Antonio Conte’s Inter Milan were as well-drilled and physically fit as any Conte team in their first October together. They still struggled to play out from the back and could not get as much service in to Romelu Lukaku as he or Conte would have wanted, but they are already recognizable as a Conte side.
On the other hand, Sarri’s Juventus has Cristiano Ronaldo and Pablo Dybala. Behind them in midfield are Miralem Pjanic and Blaine Matuidi. One line further back is Matthias de Ligt and Leonardo Bonucci. There’s only so much Conte can do against them, and it would take a lot of second-hand smoke for even Sarri to blunt those players, particularly in a game of this magnitude.
Similarly, Ralph Hasenhuttl is one of the most tactically adept coaches in the game right now. He has much more experience than Frank Lampard and could probably out-X-and-O Lampard if they sat across the table from each other.
But Lampard has N’Golo Kante. He has Tammy Abraham in the kind of form that means he simply needs to put a boot to the ball and the ball will trace a ludicrous trajectory across the goal line. Lampard’s Chelsea has some of the most in-form young talent in the Premier League (Fikayo Tomori and Mason Mount), one of the most promising young talents in Europe (Callum Hudson-Odoi) and two of the most accomplished players in the league playing like the serial winners and leaders they are (Cesar Azpilicueta and Willian).
On balance of player quality, the two games on Sunday were Frank Lampard’s and Maurizio Sarri’s to lose. Their gameplan and organization transformed their players’ higher ceilings into wins.