Chelsea: Only thing surprising in Bournemouth draw is that it was surprising

Chelsea drew 2-2 with their latest bogey team, Bournemouth, in a match that one can only wish was more surprising than it was.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: Chelsea are just not very good as a team. Frank Lampard has made mistakes in his time as manager, there’s no denying that, but he is not to blame for the players at his disposal simply not being very good.

The squad is made up of a very peculiar collection of players who are past their best, uninterested in being their best, young and inexperienced, or simply not good enough. The only thing I can really blame Lampard for is that he appears to have decided who his best players were rather than letting the players performances decide that for him. It’s the sort of mistake a lot of young managers make, and he appears to be reversing course, but it hasn’t been easy to get to that point.

It took desperation to get Marcos Alonso and Olivier Giroud on the field again, but what matters most is that they now finally are.

What is astonishing at this point is that the defense is still as indescribably terrible as they are. There are no acceptable excuses for the performance on Saturday. Each one of the defenders put in the sort of poor, dumb performance that has come to define Chelsea’s defensive effort so far this season.

I believe Fikayo Tomori is going to be a good player but he has no business on the left side of the defence, where his confidence cannot be coupled with his stature and other natural gifts. He marked and read the game far more poorly than he has in any other period this season.

He had one remarkably terrible read where he stepped out to engage a player, senselessly ceding the space behind him to a Bournemouth attacker. Naturally, they scored. That was senseless schoolyard stuff.

The same is true of Andreas Christensen who remains as much of a question mark as any central defender can ever be. He has moments where it appears he’s turning the corner, but then other moments where he can’t mark, win headers, track runners or organize his defensive partners .

Christensen and Tomori are young and are both learning. Cesar Azpilicueta remains the on-pitch leader, yet somehow people still judge him based on what they think he should do to adapt to his teammates, rather than them to him. The desires to try him as a regular center back in a four-man defence and as the world’s most conservative defensive midfielder remain.

Chelsea know the team simply isn’t good enough. It was obvious against Bayern Munich. I have highlighted the simple truths of Chelsea’s position in the league table position and the quality of the teams above them several times. It was even more obvious against Bournemouth, too.

It is a testament to Frank Lampard as a manager that he has the team moving in some semblance of a logical direction.

Patience is, as ever, the only thing that this club really needs.  hey need time to improve and learn from their many mistakes. They need time to recruit some new players and make the correct moves for not just the present but the future.  hen they need time to simply improve and play together.

Chelsea are simply not even a full season in to a first season under a new manager who has been given the worst Chelsea side in 20 years to work with and a huge number of injured players.

Reacting rashly and hastily is the only thing that they could do to make this worse.  Things are bad, but they are still far better than they have any business being.