Chelsea’s shift to a possession-based system under Maurizio Sarri and Frank Lampard has expanded Cesar Azpilicueta’s role, along with the amount of pitch he has to cover. His adaptability and versatility are as important to the team as his consistency.
Just as there is no right or wrong way to play football, contra the Twitterati and sundry pundits, there is no “easy” way to play football, contra the same. No, Sarritologists, defending deep in a low block with 30% possession is no easier on the players who have to execute it than it is on the manager who has to train them in it. When a team like Chelsea transition from controlling the game out of possession, defending and counterattacking to maintaining high possession, the individual roles flex and stretch, but they don’t get easier or harder in the global sense. Done right, the overall difficulty is the same, even as individual components go up or down in their intensity and workload.
Cesar Azpilicueta does not spend as much time under Frank Lampard or Maurizio Sarri rigorously maintaining a defensive line and measuring his one-on-one defensive efforts against those of a low block as he did under Antonio Conte or Jose Mourinho. But he does spend more time running up and down the wide areas of the pitch.
He is covering that added distance by making more sprints, meaning the load on his body is greater than just running the distances. He is not making as many defensive actions as in previous seasons because the Blues spend so much more time on the ball. But he is doing more on offence so Chelsea can control the game, and not just the ball, from possession.
Through 27 Premier League games, Azpilicueta has taken 21 shots: already a career-high, surpassing 18 shots in 38 games three seasons ago. Eleven of those shots came from inside the penalty area. By comparison, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson – the gold-standard for attacking full backs – have 36 and 17 shots, with 14 and seven inside the box, respectively.
Azpilicueta has also matched his career-high number of key passes from 2017/18. All of his 31 key passes this season have been short, indicating that he is further up the pitch and directly sending a player through on goal from an attacking position. In 2017/18, four of his key passes were long passes, suggesting involvement at the root of a counter-attack.
On the other hand, his 64 tackles have him on pace for his fourth-highest season at Chelsea. He’ll finish the season with far fewer than last season, when he had 105 tackles from similar team possession, formation and position. The same goes for interceptions and clearances.
There is no publicly available data on distance covered or sprints per game, but simply watching the game shows Azpilicueta doing more of both than in previous seasons.
He is regularly involved in the Blues’ offensive build-up, sprinting on counter-attacks to support Willian with an overlapping run or by arriving later in the play to connect the right side and centre from the top of the box. Like Marcos Alonso in earlier years, Azpilicueta is coming central more frequently on offence. His shots from the box show how much further he is coming up, which becomes how much further he has to come back, often at full speed in retreat.
Even in a season where the Blues are defending much less frequently, Azpilicueta’s defensive consistency garners the most attention. He was the only right back to start the season when Reece James was injured. When James returned, Azpilicueta covered the fiasco at left back. And when Frank Lampard has shifted to the 3-4-3, Azpilicueta dropped into centreback.
But none of that is anything new. What is new is how much Azpilicueta is doing on offence.
A player whose reputation is so thoroughly defensive is showing at age 30 that he can add more to his game, or is showing what was already there but never tapped.