Chelsea Tactics and Transfers: Too late to be showing this little progress

Chelsea lost a match that a better side would have drawn on Saturday. They showed yet again the obvious and embarrassing flaw with this current side.

In Sidney Lumet’s and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 classic film Network the most famous line is uttered in a monologue by one of the main characters who’s having an epiphany. The famous “I’m mad as hell” speech goes: “‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Loyal readers probably know where this is going. I’m not just mad, peeved or upset – and you shouldn’t be either. Neither should Frank Lampard. This isn’t good enough. Chelsea have played 23 Premier League games, it’s January, and the defence, in which I always include the goalkeeper, have made no progress in the basics of football.

Why are people at Chelsea Football Club pretending that the lack of ability to defend against simple aerial crosses is anything other than a shambolic, shameful, embarrassment? Children in the schoolyard are better at this than the current Chelsea defense. It was a problem in the first week of the season and the fact that it hasn’t improved even a little bit by January 18 of the year 2020 is absurd.

On Saturday, Chelsea supporters were forced to watch a goalkeeper who didn’t rush to organize his defense despite having the best view of the pitch of anyone.

They saw a muscular and athletic central defender time his jump so astonishingly poorly that he, in fact, began to move up in the air as one of the two players he was marking had already connected with his goalscoring header.

They saw that same defender for some reason marking two men? Why? Chelsea were not down to 10 men at this time. They had 11 supposedly worthy-of-pay professionals on the pitch at the same time that Newcastle did.

There’s no excuse for it.

The truly remarkable thing is the infuriating insipidity of the team to suggest that they somehow deserved better. They lost. They lost for making the same mistakes they made many months ago. For being either too foolish to recognize their weaknesses or too lazy to fix them in all this time despite being paid a fortune to do so they deserved to lose.

Sport is simple and that’s one of the things that make it beautiful. There is a very literal and obvious way of seeing who is better. It is reflected in who won on the day. Sure, maybe one is higher in the table or has a better record but, on that day, in those 5,400 seconds, the team who wins are better.

The absurd arrogance to suggest they deserved a different result after the match is precisely why they continue to do it. Frank Lampard should make an example out of them in training and shift things up this week.

Kepa Arrizabalaga needs to be dropped to learn that even the most expensive goalkeeper in the world must earn his place by doing the sort of things I remember learning as my team’s emergency backup goalkeeper. A keeper with a third of the Spaniard’s talent but who took his basic responsibilities seriously would be a better solution at this point.

The rest of the defence should sit for their vomit-inducing display as well. Every single one of them, except Reece James (may he recover swiftly please universe), who was injured and not on the pitch for the mishap.

The defence cannot continue to play like a group of sack race-losing incompetents with their shoelaces tied together in pound-club clown outfits and expect to win matches.

If the team had come out after the match and said “We’re angry. We got the basics wrong yet again. This isn’t good enough and we’re going to take a serious look at ourselves because this is not in keeping with the history and character of this club,” that would be one thing.

They didn’t, though.

They’re as infuriating as the babbling statistics junkies who go on about expected-whatever and what-should-have-happened-that-didn’t-this as if they somehow, through having watched football for long enough, have somehow managed to not learn that in football the only thing to expect is the unexpected.

Chelsea should be better than this.  It’s too late in the season to have not learned from these mistakes. They don’t mark runners, they don’t mark people at set pieces or corners. They don’t communicate or organize themselves. They don’t even tackle or cover one another.

Why, before the ball is delivered, someone is not going along the line literally pairing defenders and men is beyond me. Why isn’t Arrizabalaga doing that even? I don’t know. Why don’t I know? Why do I even have to ask? That’s the problem.

Frank Lampard will be angry with them because above all else he is a logical and sane man. There is no other option. Last I saw him he had functioning eyes and a sound mind.  That is what this team needs now, but more than that they should be mad with themselves.

Enough of this new age “we were better but we didn’t win” nonsense. This is professional football. If they want to continue to play this way they should surrender their salaries because it is absurd. OXFAM could do more with the money than they are.