Chelsea: Three ways from four goals the Blues suffered team-wide failures

They say you win as a team and lose as a team. Chelsea are becoming comprehensively familiar with the latter.

Teams don’t lose 2-2 (not a typo) after playing with a man advantage for over 60 minutes without a lot of things going wrong all over the pitch. No one player or moment brought about Chelsea’s atrocious night at Stamford Bridge.

1. Arsenal’s first goal: Risky set-up, woeful execution, bad luck

N’Golo Kante has recently become the winningest scapegoat in Chelsea (Premier League? Football as a whole?) history, and his slip leading to Gabriel Martinelli’s first goal no doubt triggered a re-calculation of percentage of goals conceded while Kante was on the pitch compared to minutes Chelsea have led with Kante off the pitch, or whatever the why-won’t-Statsbomb-return-my-calls* wannabe data junkies were tweeting last week.

But a lot had to go wrong before and after the slip.

Chelsea had five players in the box for their corner, two near the corner flag and two – Emerson and Mateo Kovacic – just off the top of the box. That is nine players in the final 20 yards of the pitch for a corner, with only N’Golo Kante back to cover. This is an extremely aggressive and risky set-up, even against a 10-man side, but particularly against a side that has no choice but to attack on the counter and with pace, and with the players to do it.

Some combination of Frank Lampard, Cesar Azpilicueta and whoever else arranged the team for that corner is responsible for what followed.

When Arsenal cleared the corner out of the box, Emerson – one of the two players positioned to cover a potential counterattack – charged in. Martinelli sprinted past Emerson, the player whose pace is his greatest value to the squad and his greatest differentiator over Marcos Alonso. Martinelli had several steps on Emerson before Emerson could turn back to cover the run, and he never caught up.

Emerson was closest to Martinelli throughout his run, and he should have seen only N’Golo Kante between Kepa Arrizabalaga and two counterattacking Gunners.

No matter how highly Emerson holds Kante in esteem for his defensive prowess, Emerson’s best move may have been committing a tactical foul and being sent off. In fact, knowing that he was already on a yellow, Emerson could have hauled down Martinelli anywhere. A player not on a booking would have had to do it before Martinelli got past the last man, in order to only receive a yellow. Emerson was off either way, so he could have sacrificed himself for Arrizabalaga (and the scoreboard) at any point, even after the Kante slip.

That would have leveled the squads at ten apiece. Instead, he left Kante and Arrizabalaga vulnerable to a two-on-one, which became a one-on-one between Martinelli and the keeper.

Arrizabalaga, for his part, had his usual bout of indecision. The two overarching decisions for a goalkeeper in a one-on-one are to stand his ground and anticipate the attacker moving onto his strong-side shot; or charging out to challenge and forcing the player to go around.

Arrizabalaga stood his ground, and I won’t bother arguing if that was the best choice. But he did not make himself big as Martinelli approached the box, nor did he anticipate the shot, which went straight ahead from Martinelli’s strong side – the most predictable option, which is only useful if you know what those tendencies are.