Christian Pulisic’s hat trick against Burnley was the product of Frank Lampard’s overall management of Chelsea FC. Lampard understands that mistakes and successes come in tandem with young players, and is quite alright with that trade-off
I was much less apoplectic upon my second reading of JJ Bull’s article in The Telegraph yesterday about Christian Pulisic’s hat trick. Bull sets up a false choice in the third paragraph, and once you reconcile that you can better appreciate his breakdown of Chelsea’s positioning in the moments leading up to Pulisic’s goals, and the contrast he notes towards the end between Maurizio Sarri and Frank Lampard.
Bull says “it’s difficult to tell whether Pulisic found himself in those goalscoring positions because the manager’s instructions facilitated it, or because Pulisic naturally followed the ball and effectively assigned himself a free role.” As Travis’ favourite gif asks in these situations, “Why not both?”
“Lampard appears to embrace unpredictability far more than the rigid, position-focused approach of Maurizio Sarri,” Bull writes as he starts his conclusion. Lampard’s rejection of the “rigid, position-focused approach” is the key. Pulisic “naturally followed the ball and effectively assigned himself a free role” likely because the “manager’s instructions facilitated” his doing so.
Bull accurately describes the vulnerabilities created by Pulisic’s apparently self-directed positioning.
The Blues were, in fact, sucked in to a narrow channel on the throw-in, and Pulisic himself lost the first battle for the ball far away from his nominal position. He scored his first goal only because he aggressively chased after the consequence of his own mistake, although that could also be interpreted as him simply pressing a back pass, something Lampard expects his forwards to do regardless of how the opponent came into possession. His role in the turnover could have just been extra motivation for a regularly programmed task.
Similarly, Pulisic’s movement inside often occurred independent of Marcos Alonso, leaving the forward-oriented and not-particularly-pacey full-back exposed to 2v1’s, which he would almost certainly lose.
Before the Burnley game we called attention to one aspect of Chelsea’s play this season that has seemed particularly prone to creative uncertainty: their spacing from midfield to defence.
Our article focused mostly on vertical spacing between the lines. Bull’s analysis of the Burnley game emphasizes horizontal spacing, specifically how Pulisic’s positioning altered Mason Mount’s, Willian’s and Marcos Alonso’s. We took the x-axis, he took the y-axis, but since the game is played in both (and, obviously, the z-axis, as Kurt Zouma would want us to point out) we’re just two blind men describing the same elephant.
As we’ve said several times this season, Chelsea are making a lot of mistakes under Frank Lampard: new, creative, unexpected, rarely repeated mistakes.
Each game brings a new batch, which shows both learning – they’re not doing the same thing with the same predictably adverse results over and over – and continued experimentation: mistakes are still not approaching zero. If there was an expected mistakes stat, Chelsea would have a pleasantly high xM.
Like any other persistent trend, this implies the manager is either OK with it, unable to change something or unwilling to make the necessary changes. The latter two do not seem applicable to Lampard, while the first is consistent with every statement and training ground report since Lampard took his first session in July. Situational- and constraint-based learning, which looks the basis of Lampard’s management philosophy, anticipates and almost relies on mistakes just as much as successes to teach what works, when and why.
Bull also compares Christian Pulisic’s apparently free role to the freedom Eden Hazard frequently had. This comparison is instructive for a few additional reasons.
Whatever it is a player does or doesn’t do is only a problem if you expect them to not do it, or to do it.
Eden Hazard’s unwillingness / inability to track back was only an issue for those managers who developed a system that counted on him to do it. Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte set up the team – midfielders, the other winger, the striker – so Hazard wouldn’t have to track back. In games where both wingers had to press and defend and the midfielders had to play deeper, Hazard would play centre-forward.
His offensive skills were worth having, and those managers never bemoaned the thing he doesn’t do coming at the expense of the team because they did not demand he do it.
Managers and their “systems” fall apart when they do not account for players’ weaknesses or, in the case of a player like Hazard who has an overwhelming and countervailing strength, unwillingnesses. When managers neglect their sartorial duties in squad management, they shoehorn players into roles they are not suited for, with predictably subpar and sometimes embarrassing results, followed by conflicts between the manager and the player in the locker room or the press.
Frank Lampard might not set the bar as high as Bull when it comes to determining which players get this level of freedom. Bull mentions Hazard, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Since Pulisic is nowhere near that level, Bull leans toward the conclusion that Pulisic’s free movement was contra Lampard’s instructions.
On the other hand, Lampard may just be recognizing that getting the best out of Pulisic requires him to move into positions that don’t track with those of a traditional left winger. Seeing how freely Fikayo Tomori and Kurt Zouma have played when Chelsea are in possession, Lampard may not limit the freedom to attacking.
If the price of Pulisic being at his most productive is Marcos Alonso isolated on the left, that’s fine, at least for now. As time goes on, the open space will be less of an issue through a combination of midfield and defensive tactics and the eventual return of N’Golo Kante and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. Even if a team overwhelms Alonso in space and hits Chelsea for a goal, Lampard does not seem too worried: he is very confident in his team’s ability to score more goals than they concede, perhaps in part because he is not lowering the ceiling on his forwards.
It’s easy to say that everything went perfectly according to plan when things go well, especially when so many things are going well. Credit to JJ Bull for side-stepping the carefree feel-goodery sweeping through Chelsea these days and doing some actual analysis.
However, even the best and least expected results – like a 21-year old American going from his first Premier League goal to a natural hat trick in 35 minutes – must be considered in their full context.
Christian Pulisic did not do anything different from what he and many other players have done this season. Lampard wants players who are “desperate to impress” to go “hunting for the ball and [get] in dangerous areas as a result.” Lampard will “embrace unpredictability” because he has created “an environment that rewards spontaneity rather than one where the system is king.” Pulisic’s role “may well have been a genius Lampard tactical ploy,” or it may just be Lampard’s fundamental approach to management bearing fruit.
Pulisic did everything Frank Lampard wanted him to do. Lampard just doesn’t believe in explicitly directing what that is and how to do it.
The strongest evidence is not in Christian Pulisic’s hat trick, but in how each player has played in nearly every game so far, particularly the last seven.