Chelsea and Everton took different approaches to the game, and there was one clear winner: the team that approached the game simply at the level of football fundamentals.
Do you know why managers who are typecast into discretely defined roles often utilize unoriginal, almost stereotyped tactics? For the same reason, as our high school American football coach doubling as a health teacher told us, people do drugs: Because they work.
Everton hired Duncan Ferguson as their interim manager to restore some semblance of the club’s most recent glory years, which just happened to be his personal glory years, including his and the club’s most recent trophy, the 1994/95 FA Cup. Ferguson stymied tactical bloggers just as much as he did Chelsea with his robust and traditional 4-4-2 – the ultimate back-to-basics reset formation – and the relatively simple instructions he gave his players, many of which manifested themselves in a ruggedly old-school performance that drove Goodison Park wild, gave Chelsea fits and ended with Ferguson imitating Jose Mourinho sprinting down the touchline and wildly celebrating on the pitch after the final whistle.
Chelsea did their best to play “their” football at Goodison Park. But on a day like that, Chelsea needed to remember that behind any one manager’s or team’s football are the basic principles of football that will always rule the game.
For the first 20 minutes they got sucked into trying to match Everton’s speed and physicality. They tried to fight fire with fire on a day when the wind was always with Everton. Chelsea needed players who could extend the metaphor by pouring plenty of cold water on Everton’s Ferguson-infused passion.
They needed players who could regain and then, just as importantly, maintain possession, dwelling on the ball and moving it purposefully and expansively up and down the pitch. This would not only allow them to reset their minds and bodies, but it would show Everton who was in control of the game, all while simply denying Everton more close looks at goal.
Willian is usually that player, but he often brought that sense of delay into the box, where he negated his own opportunities to take shots from within 15 yards. He needed teammates who could support him on the wings and similarly slow down the tempo of the game through their possession and the timing and choice of their passing.
Chelsea gained a foothold in the game by the 30′, and were looking like themselves again by the 40′. This was expected as no one thought Everton could maintain that pace for the first half, let alone the entire game. But nobody seemed to act on that knowledge by patiently waiting out the hyperactive home side.
Halftime gave Everton just enough of a recharge to score another early goal for 2-0. Even though Chelsea scored three minutes later, they still chased the game without getting any closer to it.
Against a team playing stereotypical “passionate club legend as interim manager in a 4-4-2”-ball, Chelsea did not need peak-Manuel Neuer playing out from the back. They needed a goalkeeper who could stop shots, smother rebounds and crosses, organize his defence and boot the ball far clear of danger.
They did not need “ball-playing centrebacks” trying to play the ball out from the back. They needed two centrebacks to win aerial duels, the first step of which is jumping up for them.
Chelsea did not need a constant rush of dribbling or passing, whether trying to charge the ball over midfield or passing the ball around and into the box. They needed patience, control, perhaps a bit of dark arts and the creativity and ball-protection necessary to find passes that cut through the frenetic cloud of blue swarming the pitch for the first half-hour. They certainly did not need, and were fortunate not to have, a one-speed one-touch wonder on the Goodison pitch.
Up front, Frank Lampard needed players more like his Derby County Rams last season than the Chelsea players who showed up. Derby County took many long range, low probability shots season and scored an unusually large number of them (outperformed their xG, in the parlance of our times). The Blues declined those opportunities as well as even better ones in the box. They did not do themselves any favours trying to pass the ball into the net: their tippy-tappy keep ball in the offensive end was slightly less dangerous but just as productive as that in the defensive end.
Chelsea had only four shots on target, and the one that was from outside the box was the one that beat Jordan Pickford. And if any player embodies a low xG, it’s the goal-scorer Mateo Kovacic.
Football teams can stay true to themselves and their identities even when they are deviating from their usual style of play. Everton stripped this game down to its fundamentals, and they beat the needless over-complications of the better side.
Frank Lampard would do well to have a Plan B and maybe a Plan C for when he really needs it. Simply going back to the roots of everybody’s Plan A would have served them well against a team that did just that.