Gary Cahill and Cesc Fabregas need minimal prompting to praise Antonio Conte. The testimonies of some of the best players of recent years demonstrate how much of a mistake Chelsea made in sacking Conte.
What do we always say around here? Well, a lot of things, we say a lot of things, and lately there’s not much new to say about Chelsea or otherwise. Let’s start over. What do we always say around here when a player talks about his experiences under a particular manager? We say to wait until the player and the manager are no longer on the same team, so the player is free to speak his mind without any impact on his career.
Cesc Fabregas, for example, was only a few months out of Chelsea before he said what his experience under Maurizio Sarri was really like. Refresher: it involved a player that Sarri favoured like a son. On Monday, Fabregas talked about two managers that he no longer plays for and probably never will play for or work with again, so we can trust what he says about them, too.
During an impromptu Twitter #AskCesc Q&A, Fabregas said he learned the most from Arsene Wenger and Antonio Conte.
Those are the two coaches under whom Fabregas played the most games, but the gap between them is immense. Wenger managed Fabregas for 303 games, Conte for 86. That means Conte’s time with Fabregas is much closer to Jose Mourinho’s (69 games) or Pep Guardiola’s (48), yet Fabregas puts Conte’s influence on par with Wenger’s.
Fabregas explained:
"[Conte made me] a player that I didn’t know I could be…on the defensive point of view, also mentally he made me work harder than ever at 29 as he told me I wasn’t his type of player and still went on to prove him wrong and ended up playing every game. Tactically u have to play the way he likes and that was also very new 4 me. – @Cesc4official"
Cross-reference Fabregas’s answer to what Gary Cahill told Jamie Redknapp in the Daily Mail earlier this month.
“He was a great manager,” Cahill said, before launching into an explanation of how intricately knowledgeable Conte was about the 3-4-3, and how that allowed Conte to teach Cahill to play as left centreback for the first time in his career, en route to a Premier League title. “The Joses, the Contes. The attention to detail, the way they think. They never switch off. You have that confidence; an arrogance in a good way.”
Mind you, Redknapp didn’t ask him anything about Conte. When Redknapp brought up the 2016/17 title, Cahill’s response was to start talking about how Antonio Conte developed him, personally, along with the team that season.
Later in the interview, Redknapp did, in fact, ask Cahill about what he has learned from the top managers he has played for, again associating Conte with Jose Mourinho.
"I’ve always been taught ‘stay goal-side, stay goal-side, stay goal-side’. But Conte wanted you to screen in front. There are different elements to defending."
Of the three managers Redknapp offered up for a recollection (Roy Hodgson being the third), Conte was the only one for whom Cahill went into specifics about what he learned.
Neither Cesc Fabregas nor Gary Cahill are linked with a move to Inter Milan, so unless one of them wants to embed themselves at Inter or a future Conte team while working on coaching qualifications, they have nothing to gain from praising Antonio Conte. Fabregas was asked which manager taught him the most, and he named two: the one he spent nearly half his senior career under, and Antonio Conte. Cahill was not even asked that much: the compliments just started rolling.
That’s the kind of impact every player wants a coach to have on him and that every worthwhile coach wants to have on a player. It’s right up there with winning trophies as what the business of coaching is all about.
Chelsea had one of the best for two seasons, and for a variety of reasons that no one will ever fully understand, they let him go. Yes, if not for Maurizio Sarri the club might not have Frank Lampard now. But Lampard was always going to make his way back to Stamford Bridge, and what Conte could have done for the club and the players will always be a major what if.
Roman Abramovich’s one regret was firing Carlo Ancelotti after his second season. If he is to have a second regret, it will be repeating the same mistake just under a decade later.