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

3. Arsenal’s second goal: Oh no, a shot!

My colleague Barrett likes to talk about the old-school things old-school English footballers used to do in the good old days of leather balls, wooden ships and iron men. It’s easy to forget he’s about the median age of our writers when he gets into full back-in-the-day mode.

But as much as everyone here at The Pride of London hates to admit it, he has a way of being right, especially about those football values that should be timeless.

Goalkeepers used to take a passionate pride in saves and clean sheets. Defenders used to share that pride in clean sheets, and as part of that, they considered any shots their goalkeeper had to save as a personal affront.

Before ball-playing centrebacks became the basement idols of the FIFA crowd, centrebacks used to do everything they could to prevent their goalkeeper from having to make a save. They threw themselves en masse in front of shots so that the goalkeeper could be what he should be: the absolute last line of defence.

On a night when Shkodran Mustafi sacrificed his Gunnersaurus’s on a Mateo Kovacic shot, Chelsea’s defenders could not muster one single Simeone between them.

Jorginho was closest to Hector Bellerin as Bellerin released his shot from the top corner of the box. Jorginho turned to his left, cringing in midair, as the shot curled around his right.

Antonio Rudiger was halfway between Bellerin and Kepa Arrizabalaga’s goal. Rudiger put his hands behind his back and did a light quarter-squat, as if he was a downhill skier doing a bit of dry-land mobility work. He did not step towards, let alone throw himself into, the path of the ball. He did not step out to cut down the angle and make himself big. Rudiger showed more movement as he slumped over with the ball in the back of the net than he did when he could have perhaps prevented that outcome.

And before the shot, Emerson was casually letting Bellerin get into position instead of forcefully muscling him out of shooting position or taking away all his options. The limping Tammy Abraham inadvertently set a pick for Bellerin to come inside for the shot, but Bellerin should not have had that space to come back to begin with.

Take a look at any number of pictures from Chelsea’s penalty area between 2003-2017: An opponent would be taking a shot, and some combination of John Terry, Gary Cahill, Ashley Cole, Branislav Ivanovic, Cesar Azpilicueta and anyone else who happened to be standing around would be dropping their bodies from every angle in an impenetrable web between the ball and Petr Cech or Thibaut Courtois. Imagine sacrificing yourself for Courtois – that’s how much they loved the team and cared about their job.

That instinct was not present on Tuesday. Instead, there was only the thought that Hector Bellerin’s left foot was more fearful than letting Arsenal equalize again. That line of thinking only ends one way: the way it did.

*It’s also not part of their founding culture to return calls. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch Twitter.