Chelsea blues’ clues: The road to glory starts at Anfield

Chelsea faces off against Liverpool at Anfield. A win could get Champions League and start the Blues on their road to glory.

Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool will be crowned champions on Wednesday, the peak of a glorious period for the Reds. There is just a small matter of facing Frank Lampard’s Chelsea before that, for whom this game marks the start of something special.

Jose Mourinho once called his Chelsea side the “little horse” of the title race in one of his most iconic press conferences. The Portuguese manager perhaps wanted to take some heat off his players with that statement but there was also some undeniable truth to his words.

His squad then was not ready to compete with Manchester City and Liverpool for the title and he accepted that. There was, however, a promise. A promise that the following season, his horse would be nourished and ready to race with the big horses.

Fast forward to 2020 and there are clear signs of history repeating itself. Lampard is following in the footsteps of his mentor by nearly guiding his Chelsea team to a third placed finished, below Manchester City and Liverpool. While the Blues haven’t been in the title race, only the ignorant would believe that Chelsea will not be in the title race next season.

Just as Mourinho nourished his little horse with the signings of Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas and Filipe Luis in 2014, Lampard has already begun breathing new life into this Chelsea side. The arrivals of Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner (via a release clause like Costa) will galvanize the front line. There is also quite a few murmurs about defensive signings in the offing that will complete the squad.

There are, however, two major differences between the 2014 and 2020 situations. The first one is  the gap between Chelsea and City and Liverpool. At the end of 2013/2014 season, Mourinho’s Chelsea was just five points away from the top, making it quite believable for him to bridge that gap with appropriate signings. Lampard has a much harder job in that sense because how far ahead Pep Guardiola’s and Klopp’s teams are in terms of quality.

While both City and Liverpool invariably fell off quite a bit during Mourinho’s title winning 14/15 campaign, it has been hard to imagine that happening to Lampard’s adversaries. Both these clubs have sound recruitment strategies in place that will help maintain their status as title challengers next season.

That brings up the second difference between 2014 and 2020; recruitment strategies. Mourinho’s signings in Costa, Fabregas and Luis were extremely cost effective and wrapped up very swiftly. These players were all in their primes as the objective was to compete immediately. It worked with Chelsea doing the domestic double the very next season.

But what happened next? Even if the fact that Chelsea’s collapse in 2015 is regarded as a freak accident, none of Mourinho’s signings from 2014 or even 2013 are still a part of the squad, expect Willian. The short sighted nature of everything Mourinho and the club accomplished eventually led to the Portuguese manager’s departure. Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri followed suit, leaving the club in a perpetually destabilized state.

Lampard’s Chelsea seems to have learned from this. Having already integrated academy graduates into the first team, Lampard has signed the likes of Werner, who represents a short term as well as a long term solution to Chelsea’s striker problem. Werner also represents a statement signing in the fact that the club secured his signature even though there were quite a few clubs interested in the player.

The real statement though would be if Chelsea is indeed able to secure the signature of Werner’s German compatriot in Kai Havertz. The wonder kid is the apple of the eye of German football, joining Jadon Sancho in being a truly generational talent, just a tier below Kylian Mbappe.

Any club in the world would want him and every elite club dreams of him, so if Chelsea does end up being his destination the club would be on the way to being a part of football’s true elites again. The Blues would be a club that a player dreams of playing for rather than the stepping stone it has become today. It would become a major attraction for players of Havertz’s ilk, like Barcelona and Real Madrid.

There is however one prerequisite to this pipe dream; Champions League football. While this may not factor into the Havertz deal, elite players want to play in the Champions League every year, something Chelsea has not been able to guarantee as of late. The financial rewards of participating in the Champions League also make it possible for clubs like Chelsea to sign these elite players, making it absolutely essential to qualify for the competition. Lampard has the chance to fulfill this requirement when Chelsea faces Liverpool on Wednesday night.

Following the transfer ban and Eden Hazard’s departure, Lampard and his men were not expected to be vying for the third place let alone be in the top four race at the start of the season. And while they have been far from perfect, they have done outstandingly well to be in the position they are today.

With the signings that are beckoning, the top four will be an unsaid expectation rather than an objective from next season, so it is crucial that the Blues upset the odds one last time to cement their Champions League status for next season. Should they do that, Havertz, Jan Oblak and whoever is linked to Chelsea in the future will become realistic targets rather than just rumors.

In many ways, Wednesday’s match could be looked back on in two or three years as the starting point for Lampard’s little horse to grow into an elite horse, not just the big horse that Mourinho settled for.

And it will be quite fitting if this takes place at the home of the new champions of England, which will oversee a long overdue coronation on Wednesday but also the birth of potentially the best team in England and indeed the world for the years to come. Simply put, Chelsea’s road to glory starts at Anfield.