Billy Gilmour needed less than 90 minutes against Liverpool to go from Chelsea prospect to 360 degree media pressure cooker. The expectations are high, but are least built around him.
Travis opens his adjacent article with a tweet from Billy Gilmour’s debut in September that caught a reaction from the Sarritology community that, at the time, was still working through the 12 stages of mourning. Gilmour’s start against Liverpool on Tuesday gave him a jump on Jorginho’s three game suspension across two competitions. Because Gilmour and Jorginho play similar positions and because Gilmour – in the absence of N’Golo Kante – will replace Jorginho in Chelsea’s next three games, comparisons between the two were inevitable.
Setting aside the subliterate keyboard mashing in the replies to our tweet, the main threads of disagreement seemed to be: (a) that they actually play two different positions and therefore should not be compared, and (b) we’re holding Jorginho to too high a standard.
We mostly agree with (a). While both Gilmour and Jorginho play at the base of midfield, Gilmour’s application of that role is much more expansive than Jorginho’s.
This may just reflect the difference between the football cultures in which they developed. As much as we hate to use the word, Jorginho is very much a textbook r*****a (I can’t pull myself to do it). And we mean “textbook”: his play is as starkly limited as the definition is itself, but within the confines of that definition and structures of football that maintain r*****as and the like, he is quite good.
As for (b), well, see our response to (a).
Expectations around Jorginho were skewed by the hype around him. The people holding court about r*****as and asking who even watched Napoli last season (now two seasons ago) did not understand the limitations inherent in the role or in Maurizio Sarri’s system (shocker, right? They didn’t understand something). Jorginho was the midfield Messiah. The comparisons were not just to one of Andrew Pirlo, Sergio Busquets or Andres Iniesta, but to the combination of all of them. Jorginho would not just displace N’Golo Kante from his defensive midfield duties, he would render obsolete Kante and the whole concept of a defensive midfielder.
The fact that the Premier League does not care a whit for textbook-defined roles and rigid circuit play immediately undercut Jorginho. If he was going to be on the pitch in that position, he had to do what the Premier League would make him do rather than what an Italian textbook said he would do.
That set the expectation battle he would never win.
Billy Gilmour has high expectations around him. But he doesn’t have a hype machine and a cult of personality around him, and this – obviously – is to his benefit.
What people are saying this week (or, in our case, September) about Billy Gilmour is based on what he has done. He has shown a wide range of tactical and technical abilities, and those are the basis of what people are saying he can do, will do and someday will do even better for Chelsea and Scotland.
No one is imputing to him things he has never done. No one is saying he’ll be good for 8-10 headed goals a season. That would be ridiculous for a lot of reasons. But that’s the equivalent of the expectation mutation that whirled around Jorginho last season.
Hype a player all you want. We’d prefer if you didn’t, but we understand. But if you’re going to, build the hype around what you’ve seen, not what you want, and definitely not what you think you want others to see.
That sets everyone up for disappointment, except for those who were never fooled in the first place.