Chelsea 1-1 Nottingham Forest (Madueke 57’| Wood 49′)
STAMFORD BRIDGE — Before anything else, this was great fun. Chelsea’s joyous attack of misunderstood footballing alchemists writhed and flicked and stopped and started, a misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms.
It climaxed with 13 whiplash-inducing minutes of added-time, raw and rowdy and roughshod, an increasingly terse second half at one point breaking out into a full-scale brawl of adolescent shoving and name-calling. Although, for what it’s worth, you got the impression Nicolas Jackson was ready to escalate things if Enzo Maresca would have just let him at ‘em.
For all the talk of an unwavering tactical blueprint pre-Chelsea, Maresca appears to appreciate the opportunity in front of him. Gifted a team littered with Cole Palmer, Jadon Sancho, Noni Madueke and Joao Felix, he is leaning into the magic rather than trying to tame it. Even if they couldn’t conjure up three points in the deceptive cold, they were perfectly capable of doing so.
Madueke should have beaten Nottingham Forest single-handedly. He finished with seven shots, three of which could have formed a five-minute hat-trick not unlike his 14-minute Wolves assault. Direct and destructive, the 22-year-old’s biggest obstacle appears to be overconfidence, the natural consequence of a first Premier League hat-trick and consecutive England call-ups. A balance will come with experience, helped by his sparkling interplay with Palmer.
On the left, Sancho, a fantastic, Tangfastic footballer who can toy with time at will, fizzed and popped past and through Ola Aina. It is remarkable what a bit of love and support can do.
English football should want Sancho to succeed at Chelsea, a breed of free-wheeling talent we need to believe can still thrive in the Premier League. With Palmer reinventing the modern No 10, Madueke glimmering and Jackson among the league’s most intelligent strikers, Chelsea are rapidly becoming appointment viewing for very different reasons than they have been of late.
If anything, this reputation is only helped by their impressive individual defenders who are yet to quite form a coherent defence. Wesley Fofana and Levi Colwill just need time together to merge into the gaps between them, while Robert Sanchez’s instinct save moments from full-time will have done wonders for his pockmarked reputation.
Yet there is an inevitable paradox to Chelsea’s often thrilling youth, fuelled by the boldness of inexperience but still limited by the follies of immaturity.
Before this weekend, Chelsea had the youngest average starting XI in the Premier League by over two years. Against Forest, they were disproportionately distracted and frustrated by time-wasting, which began promptly with the second half.
Matz Sels spent whole minutes ruminating over goal kicks which were only ever going long. James Ward-Prowse – eventually sent off for self-sacrificially blocking a counter-attack – pondered the free-kick which led to Forest’s goal for over 30 seconds, and only after Murillo had personally shepherded it 20 yards to its designated spot, which may well have contributed to the defensive lapse.
Palmer was booked during an altercation surrounding a Forest free-kick, and only after a melee had formed and dissipated around the ball, just wasting more time. This was all before the headline bout, triggered by Neco Williams appearing to push Marc Cucurella into Maresca. Palmer, to his credit, watched on from the floor like a kid watching his big brothers scrapping.
This outsized reaction exposed both unity and immaturity, feeding into a wider narrative about poor discipline at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea’s 27 yellow cards this season – five of which came on Sunday – is a league-high, including 10 for either dissent, arguing or excessive celebration. Fofana and Cucurella are already suspended for the Liverpool game. This will cost them matches.
To a certain extent this was a durability test for the recent bounce, a draw to an ostensibly bottom-half team who sat deep and played dirty. Chelsea are now 12 games unbeaten in the Premier League and for once, a disappointing result didn’t feel like a harbinger of the apocalypse.
Maresca has fortified the foundations to steady these hair-trigger descents into baying madness, his greatest achievement to date. The challenge now is to see just how much more fun Chelsea can have.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/ji6PpeO
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