Chelsea’s Timo Werner shows he’s the real deal despite Spurs defeat

Despite defeat to Tottenham in the EFL Cup, Chelsea fans should rejoice in the fact they’ve finally found the real deal up front in Timo Werner.

Ahh, Chelsea’s 2021 EFL Cup ambitions, we hardly knew ye. Gone but not forgotten. Thoughts and prayers, I want to run to you etc. Seriously though, going out to Spurs in a penalty shootout was unsavory, to say the least, and unreasonably painful if we’re being brutally honest.

And yet, the overriding feeling in the aftermath has been one of strange optimism. An optimism born out of one man, and his immaculate skill. That man is Timo Werner.

Now, this is not exactly a revelation. It was known Werner was good before he kicked a ball against Spurs, because he’d already hit some pretty devastating ones against them earlier this year. But what Tuesday night confirmed was that he, perhaps ahead of any other summer signing, will be the difference-maker this season.

Which is strange, because though touted, it doesn’t feel like he’s been the headline addition. Perhaps that’s just in my own personal take bubble – I’ve been a Kai Havertz guy since July, but despite the hattrick, his first few games have shown that, like Christian Pulisic and Eden Hazard before him, he’ll need time to fully impose himself.

I was also quietly pining after Luis Suarez throughout his Barcelona exodus, pretty gutted when he signed for Atletico Madrid and in impetuous “told-you-so” mood when his 20-minute debut incurred two goals and an assist. That was primarily based on the fact that a player of his experience and quality doesn’t come around for free very often, and he’d add a (wait for it) bite to the side that’s been missing for some time. Now, if Olivier Giroud decides to up and leave before the end of the transfer window, I may well get to retain that take, but as it stands I can’t.

Werner is too good, and adding another evidently egotistical, albeit world-beating (and he is world-beating, he was the best player in the world that last season at Liverpool and that goes to the grave) forward to a frontline of new faces is not ideal.

But with Hakim Ziyech still on the sidelines, Thiago Silva slipping and Ben Chilwell reduced, Werner has been center stage, and it doesn’t feel hyperbolic to say he’s been the club’s best performer in the nascent season so far. Of course, Mason Mount might have something to say about that, though if Werner hadn’t been cramping he would have scored the fifth penalty.

No, this can never be proved, and no, it can’t be known whether the German’s so-called “cramp” was an excuse proffered by the man himself to not step up, or from the man who said it, Frank Lampard, to absolve himself of blame for picking Mount as the decider. But let’s steer away from the hypothetical and move on to the aesthetical. Because isn’t he just a beautiful footballer?

Even at 70 percent, which nearly all professional footballers seem to be, he’s got that air of class that comes with players accustomed to banging 25 goals in a season before their 25 years old. He’s also different from the typical focal point forward fans have been used to at Stamford Bridge, the obvious example being that he’s a number nine who wear’s the number 11. In a way, he’s Alvaro Morata, but faster, trickier, a better finisher, more confident and less moody.

And that class doesn’t come at the cost of hard work, either. Werner’s just as much a tireless terrier as Mount is, hence Liverpool’s ardent, and ultimately futile ardor. So while we reckon with this stuttering start to the season, and take in the inevitable “Frank’s a fraud” fallout, rejoice in the simple things. Like Timo Werner caressing the ball at the edge of the area with one touch and crashing it into the net with the next.

And remember, like most simple things, it’s only simple because someone highly skilled has made it look so.