Chelsea player ratings: Those who needed to, didn’t; those who didn’t, did
By George Perry
Jorginho, Midfield: 7.5
Jorginho had a strong first half, and for once Chelsea needed his pointy-shouty ways to herd the cats of this unfamiliar XI.
Every time Jorginho turned towards his centrebacks to receive the ball in the first half, he would see Ross Barkley dropping even deeper than him, bringing a few Nottingham Forest players and a few his own teammates with him. This forced Jorginho to go wide to offer a different option, and then he had to direct traffic around all the confusion. The Blues would end up with all four defenders and two or three midfielders smushed together in Chelsea’s half. They were in two horizontal lines, which precluded forward passing, leaving the centrebacks looking for the best of no good options. Jorginho did his best to find that option and, ultimately, stop this needless back-up from repeating itself.
By the second half, Chelsea had figured out the basics of building the play up from the back, which allowed Jorginho to get comfortable in his usual role. That, unfortunately, brought with it the usual “stolen assists” of passes over- or under-cooked to where he may or may not have wanted the forwards to be. After two such in the first 10 minutes of the half, Jorginho sent a perfect throughball from 10 yards away to Ross Barkley, whose first touch somehow carried the ball out of play.
For the remainder, though, he helped Chelsea maintain quiet possession and see out the game, which is all anyone could have wanted.
Mateo Kovacic, Midfielder: 7
A game like this does not need much out of Mateo Kovacic, so he rightly did not have much to do.
For the most part he resisted joining the overeager gaggle of players trying to build the play out, which was good, as rarely do more bodies solve any problem. On the other hand, he is probably the best player to dribble out of such a congested, self-inflicted situation.
It’s good that he was able to play to give Mason Mount the first 68 minutes off, and there was no harm done by bringing him off for the final 22 minutes.
Ross Barkley, Midfielder: 5
On the one hand, it’s hard to fault a player who is obviously lacking match sharpness and possibly confidence from being left out of the lineup for so long. On the other hand, minimal standards must always apply. (We’ll come back to this, too.)
Barkley had the lowest pass completion percentage of any Chelsea starter, which is remarkable because he did not try anything particularly ambitious. Short passes went awry simply because he had the angle run, read his teammates’ runs wrong or tried a flick from the outside of his boot for no justifiable reason. As we chronicled above, he garbled Chelsea’s play out from the back.
Yes, he scored the insurance goal. He was in the right place at the right time, stayed onside and buried his chance. We can’t take that away from him. But it is still not enough to move his performance into the positive. If Frank Lampard was thinking of this as Barkley’s last chance to keep his place on the squad (that is, on the bench), well, read Kevin’s article from Saturday after you’re done here.