Chelsea’s loss to Bournemouth drove home the difficulty Frank Lampard will have changing Chelsea’s style of play at a more fundamental level than “absorb and counter” or “attacking.”
“Centre back to centre back, full back to full back, back to centre back, back to full back…” Did Frank Lampard even watch Chelsea last season? Of course he did, poor guy, he’s even more devoted than us. Watching his Blues on Saturday, he may have wondered which version of Chelsea he was watching: his own, or that of the last three seasons. Lampard’s description of the repetitive passing is something with which every mildly informed fan is quite familiar, as U-shapes on pass maps and StatsZone’s pile of arrows reached new levels of ubiquity under Maurizio Sarri .
Lampard was not even exaggerating with his description of his team’s passing. Rudiger to Zouma and Zouma to Rudiger were the two most frequent pass combinations: 75 passes went between the two of them. Zouma to Emerson (20 passes) and Emerson to Zouma (15) were next. In the next few places were various combinations of the centrebacks, Jorginho and Kepa Arrizabalaga. Then Cesar Azpilicueta shows up with 11 passes to Rudiger.
You have to keep going down to find Kurt Zouma making nine passes to Mason Mount to encounter a forward / attacking midfielder. Those were all short passes and eight were near midfield, as Mount continually dropped back to receive the ball during build-up. Mount’s four passes to Christian Pulisic were the most between any two of Chelsea’s four forwards / attacking midfielders.
What did Lampard want the Blues to do? “[H]ave the personality and the balls to take the ball in an area and beat someone or play forwards.”
Without Mateo Kovacic in the starting XI, Emerson and Callum Hudson-Odoi led the team in dribbles, with two each. Both of Emerson’s take-ons were in Chelsea’s half, and Hudson-Odoi came on in the 65′. One of Hudson-Odoi’s was the only successful dribble Chelsea had in the final third. It was in the 93′.
Most of Chelsea’s obvious learning curve this season has been making the switch from Antonio Conte’s and Maurizio Sarri’s repetitive training and circuit-based patterns of play to Lampard’s approach of independent decision-making and creativity. The Blues have made plenty of mistakes, but they were rarely the same mistake. Most were errors of decision-making rather than execution, although sometimes it was hard to tell one from the other when a player sends the ball one way and his intended target thought it was going the other way.
But in the recent games against West Ham, Everton and Bournemouth, Chelsea have started to make the most uncreative, repetitive mistake of all: reverting to the centre back to centre back, full back to full back, back to centre back, back to full back horseshoe pass system.
This highlights the double-edged sword of circuit-based systems. By design and definition they are predictable, comfortable and safely executable. They are easy to teach, easy to learn and re-learn, and are an easy plug-and-play solution when nothing else is working.
Frank Lampard may not be training the team in these methods and half of his squad were not with Chelsea over the last two seasons when such were they way of life. But enough of them know them and they are easy enough for the others to pick up and fill-in-the-blanks. Then, when facing a compact 4-4-2, they understandably seem like a decent thing to do when not only is nothing else working, but nothing else even looks possible. At the very least, it’s a useful way to maintain possession in the final third.
But maintaining possession in the final third is the sort of empty statistic that padded last season’s stasis. Many of Chelsea’s best seasons came when they had minimal possession in the final third, but they were dynamic and clinical with the possession they did have.
That’s the final piece of the nexus Lampard needs to instill in his club. He wants them to attack through sustained pressure and possession. The pressure and possession are only one part of it. The attack is the other. To tie these attributes together – for the players to attack as if they are on a counter-attack even though they are actually controlling play in the final third – they need to draw on a broader scope of football than what many of these players know from their time at the club.
Hence why any expectations of immediate success under Frank Lampard were always shallow.
He is still developing his expectations and system, and the pedagogy to implement it. He is learning as much (maybe more) than his players, not just about what he wants and how to get it, but what tendencies and cultural habits within the club he needs to manage en route. The operative word being manage, not dispose and dictate.
It’s also worth pointing out that over the last three seasons of circuit-based play, Chelsea had a player who could short out his team’s inertia and the opponent’s strength. The game against Bournemouth was just the sort of game where, over the last few years, Chelsea could shift their game plan to “Get the ball to Eden Hazard, let him do his thing.”
Hazard could break out of Chelsea’s U-shaped pattern and shatter the opponent’s low block and steal a goal and a win. The circuits were Plan A, and Hazard was the Plan B.
Without Hazard and with a new philosophy at the top, decision-based football is Plan A and the circuits are the implicit Plan B. Lampard will need to replace them with his preferred Plan B for those times when his Plan A runs aground.
That leaves Lampard with two plans on his to-do list with the club at a sticking point going into the festive period. He will not lower his standards, but understanding what he is doing and the significance of those changes should lead to a lowering – or at least a moderating – of expectations.