Just what is going on at Chelsea FC this season? A fourth place finishing team last season, Stamford Bridge obliterated everyone on the planet in the summer transfer window, but all that added spending has only yielded worse results, not better, thus far.
Getting dominated by Manchester City yesterday, 3-1, dropped the Blues to eighth in the table. Makaing matters worse, all but one of the teams above them have at least one game in hand on Chelsea, and two sides actually have two less matches played.
Yesterday saw the first time all season that Chelsea attacking players Christian Pulisic, Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner all started together. It was expecting that splashing the cash in the final third would lead to an extremely high scoring club, but City’s back line was fully in control most of the game.
The Blues have only scored five goals in their past five games, and have now dropped four of their last six. Pulisic, as well as central defender Thiago Silva, have offered their take on the situation.
Pulisic broke down what went wrong at home versus City.
“We’re in a tough period,” Pulisic said to Chelsea FC. “It’s going to happen to everyone at times, and we’ve been in these situations ourselves before.
“We have a game next week where we need to start turning it around because we do need to start getting results quickly.
“We’ll watch this game back, look at it as a team and see what we can improve on. It’s not going to be easy, but we need to show character now.
We have some games coming up where we need to turn it around quickly and start putting together a run of results.”
Yes, there have been a lot of injuries, but that doesn’t totally explain this disastrous start to the season. The good results for Chelsea this season don’t really correlate with the team having higher fitness levels, just like the bad results aren’t synoymous with the times when the players unavailable list was longer.
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As for Silva, he spoke with French outlet RMC Sport, and he had no answers to the universal question- just what is happening? Why isn’t this working?
“No, I don’t understand what’s wrong,” the 36-year-old central defender responded.
“If I understand before, I think I could have given some advice, but that’s how it is, it’s football, it’s the Premier League, one of the toughest championships around the world.
“You have to be careful, work harder, be stronger as a team, but I think the team is good, the second half was much better than the first in my opinion.
In addition to beefing up the attack, Chelsea also strengthened the squad at goalkeeper, defense and midfield. However, it’s painfully obvious right now that manager Frank Lampard hasn’t yet figured out his best XI, nor the roles for everybody.
He’ll be given time, perhaps a bit more than others would simply because of who he is, but that rope only has a certain amount of length before enough is enough.
“We tried to play a little more, we managed to play,” Silva continued.
“I think we were superior in possession of the ball in the second half, sometimes it does not work as we want, as we have prepared, but hey, that’s how it is football. We must prepare for the next match when it arrives.”
Up next for Chelsea is a FA Cup clash against lower flight Morecombe on Sunday.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Tribune and SB Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.