Chelsea three things to look for against Barnsley: Rotation and practice

3. Can Chelsea pick the lock?

The Blues have spent their first two matches of the season employing the same strategy over and over: hit the ball long and hope Timo Werner gets to it first. Barbaric? Slightly. Effective? Relatively.

Against Liverpool, route one tactics make a lot of sense. Every knows Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold are going to camp out in the attacking half of the field, and the centerback who isn’t Virgil Van Dijk is somewhat suspect. Play off that second centerback’s shoulder and pump balls upfield and hope something falls kindly. Easier said than done, of course, but it’s the way to go. It almost paid dividends for Chelsea a handful of times on Sunday, and ultimately won Chelsea a penalty.

While that’s all well and good, one wouldn’t have expected that same strategy to be necessary against Brighton. What are they going to do? Pin the Blues in their own half and force them into turnovers every time they get the ball? Apparently, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

Graham Potter’s team absolutely dominated Chelsea for a good portion of their first match of the season last Monday. It wasn’t until Kurt Zouma scored Chelsea’s third goal that the pressure began to subside. The Blues were resigned to battening down the hatches at the back and then lumping the ball upfield for large stretches of the match. Fortunately, Timo Werner was more than willing to keep chasing down balls, and his ridiculous work rate was rewarded with a penalty that Jorginho converted to open the scoring.

All of that is to say that Barnsley will present Chelsea’s first test at breaking down a team who will sit back and park the bus. This was exactly the sort of thing Chelsea struggled to deal with last season, and is arguably the reason behind signing the likes of Werner, Kai Havertz and Hakim Ziyech. Ironically, it’s unlikely any of those three play on Wednesday, so it will be a test of how the returning cast of players can solve the problems that stymied them so often last season. Hopefully they’ve learned something from the newcomers.

Fortunately, as far as low blocks go, Barnsley’s should be the most penetrable one Chelsea will face all season. They simply aren’t very good. Gerhard Struber (great name) and his side barely escaped relegation from the Championship last season and are already treading water right above the drop zone again. Their survival was the result of Wigan Athletic’s 12-point deduction rather than any success on their part. Not exactly inspiring stuff.

Regardless, this will be a great test for the Blues at this early stage of the season. The tactics that made inroads against Brighton and Liverpool won’t be worth much against a conservative side like Barnsley. Instead, it will take coordination and ingenuity to get in behind the backline and put the game to bed with the minimum of fuss. “Minimum of fuss” isn’t a philosophy that Lampard’s team has ever subscribed to, but now would be as good a time as any to start.