Tactics and Transfers: Chelsea deserved to lose before Anthony Taylor made them

Chelsea was the victim of a comically poor refereeing performance at Wembley in the FA Cup final against Arsenal, but the Blues deserved to lose regardless.

There’s no excuse for Chelsea’s performance against Arsenal in the FA Cup. It would be a failure of massive proportions to suggest that Chelsea was good enough on the day, even if the performance of the referee let down the institution that is the FA Cup Final. It is important for the Blues to keep in mind that, as is true in life, they lost the second that they even began to look at the referee for blame in a moment where they let themselves down more than he.

They had a 1-0 lead in the 5′ and rather than controlling the game and marshaling Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Hector Bellerin with esteem, they handed the game over to the North Londoners in embarrassing fashion. Yes, players got injured; yes, players were booked in unfair ways, but Chelsea pitying itself for most of the match was the reason that it lost and nothing more.

If anything, we now have proof of how good a manager Frank Lampard is going to be someday in the fact that he acknowledged as much after the game. His team is at best, bad. At worst, terrible. He, as of now, is fairly faultless about that. He has had no say in its structure and has been forced to supplement it with youth team players. Think about how much it means that the best player in the side this season has been one who played in the Championship last year. This same squad has not qualified for the Champions League in consecutive years in the past six seasons until Lampard arrived. Dedicate some thought to that; that’s the current standard, as sad as it may be.

As the Kepa Arrizabalaga debate won’t be resolved until something substantial happens on the goalkeeping front, the FA Cup Final was a case for those arguing that it’s more the fault of the defense than his. Each member of the defense played a mediocre match on their own and a terrible one as a unit. They conceded a weak penalty—born off poor positioning, a lack of unity or communication—and then a team horror show for the second.

Considering that this is the manner in which they have played for the majority of the season, it’s no wonder Chelsea has conceded so many goals. It seems unfair and illogical to simply blame a goalkeeper for his errors in the 18 yards he has to cover while absolving all others for foolishness in the 90 or so that is their duty.

Now that the domestic competition has officially ended, it will be interesting to see how things progress. The squad will need to be remade, reformed, and readjusted by Frank Lampard before he can be judged entirely.

Nothing that happens past this point this season is going to be of substance. Chelsea is already down by so much to Bayern Munich that to expect anything other than a crushing loss would be illogical. Therefore, if the Blues do manage to pull off the sort of miracle that they have been known to in Munich, everything is beautiful, delicious icing, but still cannot be adjudged as all that meaningful.

If they were to pull off some sort of ethereal event, that is exactly what it would be. It would be a higher power guiding Chelsea forward at that point and not Lampard or his staff, so giving them too much credit for that miracle would be a mistake. That said, holding the failure against them would be unfair as well. One team in the matchup is the mighty Bayern Munich. The other team is one whose best player still has spots and played for only the 10th best team in the Championship for a single season.

The time for assessment of the team, the staff and the season is over. Chelsea knows where it stands and we know who it is. The only things that Chelsea needs to do is resist the urge to overreact or make hasty, irrational decisions and to accept responsibility for why things are where they are. The Blues can’t spend any more time blaming past managers, COVID, referees or injuries. That is not the mentality of champions and mentality more than anything is what this team needs now.