Chelsea provided hope and holiday comfort to another team hovering near the relegation zone. Here are a few aspects that contributed to a sad Boxing Day loss.
Chelsea’s ideal scenario is to play the remainder of their 19 games on the road against top six teams. They do quite well under those circumstances. But since that can’t happen for a variety of reasons, let’s take a quick look at three areas that played into Chelsea losing at home to the 17th-placed team.
1. Callum Hudson-Odoi’s positioning compounded his performance
Callum Hudson-Odoi started his first Premier League game in over two months. The positive reading of his performance is that he seemed to take the initiative out of a desire to do everything and take the game on by himself. The less generous read is that he was somewhere between selfish and out of place in the team’s tactics.
Hudson-Odoi spent much of the first half everywhere on the pitch except where he needed to be. He frequently dropped deep to receive the ball and bring it up field.
He may have been responding to Chelsea’s struggles to advance the play centrally in Mateo Kovacic’s absence, or he may have just been looking to get on the ball, take a few touches and built up momentum dribbling into the final third. Or, for all we know, this was one of Frank Lampard’s ways of compensating for not having Kovacic (more on that below).
Regardless, this left Chelsea in a 3-4-3 with many of their players wide and one of their most talented dribblers running the ball headlong into Southampton’s low block.
Hudson-Odoi and Willian also did not seem to read each other’s movements well. Hudson-Odoi would switch sides of the field, but it was not coordinated with Willian or the flow of play, which would leave the two wingers on the left side (usually how it went) of the pitch and Cesar Azpilicueta wide open on the right. This made Azpilicueta a good outlet for long switches of play, which Chelsea executed well, but did nothing to break down Southampton’s defence.
With Hudson-Odoi and Willian on the same side, Southampton’s defence merely had to shift a little to wall off their threat.
If the ball went to Azpilicueta in space on the right, Southampton did not need to do anything. Azpilicueta did not have any support (see #3 below) to play one-two’s or on the overlap, so all Southampton had to do was wait for the inevitable, no-other-option cross.