Mauricio Pochettino’s Chelsea project making good strides ahead of Tottenham return
At any other point in the last four years, a visit from Mauricio Pochettino would have been a moment of heartfelt nostalgia and yearning for a hero to return home.
Not anymore.
It is a testament to the giddy high of Ange Postecoglou’s start at Tottenham that nobody pines for Pochettino and that his arrival in the dugout on Monday evening will most likely be greeted with applause.
It’s easy to be gracious when you’re on top.
And Spurs are decisively that, their brief five-point lead at the summit of the Premier League table last Friday the club’s largest gap since 1960/61, the year they were last champions.
Even at the peak of the Pochettino era it was never this good.
The league table after ten games can be deceiving, mind, and although Chelsea and Tottenham are separated by 14 points after ten matches Postecoglou’s and Pochettino’s respective starts at their new clubs haven’t been quite as different as it might appear.
Chelsea having been playing much better than results suggest and Tottenham, as the season goes on, are slightly declining.
Opta’s modelling of ‘expected points’ has Tottenham in sixth on 17.05 points and Chelsea one place above them on 19.07 points. It’s not an infallible statistic, but it hints at something worth exploring before the two managers meet on Monday night.
Pochettino’s project is making good strides despite appearances.
In classic Poch style, the hybrid 3-4-3/4-2-3-1 formation looks fluid and compact; Chelsea’s pressing is organised and distinctive; and the urgent vertical passing through Cole Palmer and Enzo Fernandez is clicking – until the ball gets into the final third, that is.
Tottenham are top of the charts for touches in the opposition penalty area (373), which is to be expected, but it might be a surprise to learn that Chelsea are second on that list (334).
As Alan Shearer highlighted in some excellent analysis on Match of the Day last weekend Nicolas Jackson isn’t just failing to put away chances, he is making all the wrong runs and failing to support the Chelsea playmakers.
That’s why Chelsea are joint-second (with Spurs) for passes into the final third, with 432, but all the way down in 11th for shots taken (136) and 15th for shot accuracy (30.1%), giving Chelsea the worst score in the division on goals to xG (-6.2).
When Christopher Nkunku is back Chelsea might just explode into life, and meanwhile we can anticipate Tottenham slowing down a little over the coming weeks, a process that might already have started.
Spurs’ 10 shots, with just 1 on target, against Crystal Palace was their lowest of the season so far and it directly followed the “worst 45 minutes we’ve had”, in the words of Postecoglou, in the second half of a 2-0 victory over Fulham.
In fact, over the last three matches (including a hard-fought 1-0 win at Luton), Spurs have averaged 13.4 shots, down from 18.3 per match in their first seven.
What’s more Spurs don’t have the deepest of benches and ten of their players have started at least nine of the first ten Premier League matches, which is simply unsustainable over the course of a season.
Coming down off the honeymoon high was always likely to happen at some point and, in time, Chelsea and Spurs should start drifting a little closer to each other.
The process might even begin on Monday.
It should be an excellent game no matter the outcome, similar in its wildly frenetic end-to-end energy to Chelsea’s 1-1 draw with Liverpool on the opening weekend or Tottenham’s 2-0 victory over Manchester United at the end of August, two matches that could have ended as thumping wins in any direction.
Spurs are dogmatic in their commitment to expansive attacking football, and although Chelsea were more cautious in the 2-2 draw with Arsenal they will most likely be drawn in by the atmosphere – and by the spaces Postecoglou’s team leaves.
Spurs’ high line is a red rag to Pochettino, who wants his teams to drive forward in the dribble and assert themselves in Bielsa-style straight lines.
Should the game become stretched, then the key battleground is central midfield, where an entangled mesh of bodies will be fascinating to watch.
For the hosts, inverting full-backs threaten to overload and overwhelm Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez, likely to operate as a two-man anchor for Chelsea, while for the visitors the box-shape midfield that links to Conor Gallagher and Cole Palmer will hope to thread the ball beyond Yves Bissouma and Pape Sarr.
Somewhere in all that James Maddison will want the ball.
Inevitably, how both teams look to build out from the back will largely define this complicated midfield fight.
Transitions are the most important moments in football these days, and it will be interesting to see whether Sarr and Bissouma can wriggle away from Gallagher and Palmer; and whether Fernandez and Caicedo have the composure to evade Postecoglou’s furious pressing traps.
The other area of particular interest is down Tottenham’s left, where injuries to Destiny Udogie and Ben Davies mean Emerson Royal deputising at left-back.
That is a potentially vulnerable spot for Chelsea, who naturally lean out to that side anyway and who will surely field Raheem Sterling here to run straight at Emerson.
Indeed if the cluttered midfield leads to greater attacking focus down the wings, then Chelsea appear to hold the advantage, with neither Richarlison nor Dejan Kulusevski particularly finding their feet under Postecoglou.
It is too close to call.
That is not what most people seem to be expecting because it does not conform to what a simple reading of the league table would suggest, but Chelsea and Spurs are not as far apart as they appear.
There is a chance that Pochettino will find a way to get under the skin, to evoke nostalgia and regret, after all.
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