Chelsea Perspective

Chelsea have had their pants pulled down so much with Honest Ahanor btw. £40m😂😂 Guy is one of the worst centre backs I’ve ever seen

Premier League Team of the Week - #GW9 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🌟

🧠 Xabi Alonso is a world-class coach. But right now, his tactical overthinking is the last thing Chelsea need. ✍️ Alex Keble 💰 The billions spent on youth, the constant churn for accountancy tricks, the bottom-half finishes: Chelsea remain engulfed in an identity crisis of their own making. What this squad needs isn’t complexity—it’s stability, order, and calm. 👨‍🏫 The owners’ decision to appoint Alonso as ‘manager’ rather than ‘head coach’—and to finally allow over-30s into the building—suggested lessons had been learned from four years of move-fast-and-break-things chaos. 🥴 Yet judging by the instability of Alonso’s setups this season, the mess is only being compounded. In nine Premier League matches, Alonso has already fielded: ▪️ 6 different combinations in defence ▪️ 5 different combinations in central midfield 😫 From trialling a Henderson–Barco pivot at Brentford to an ill-fated strikerless 4-4-2 against Tottenham, Chelsea keep making life unnecessarily difficult for themselves. 🤷‍♂️ Against Manchester United on Saturday, that overthinking resurfaced. Chelsea were a shambles in the first half largely due to a bizarre role for Cole Palmer that scrambled brains across the pitch. 😵‍💫 By dropping Palmer into a flat line across midfield, Chelsea stripped away all forward verticality. With passing lanes choked, they coughed up cheap turnovers, sparking chaotic, end-to-end transitions. 🕹️ Once Alonso corrected the error at half-time—restoring a conventional 4-2-3-1 and pushing Palmer higher between the lines—Chelsea took control. United couldn’t live with the central passes, and Palmer’s advanced presence directly opened up space for Morgan Rogers’ opener. 🌪️ The takeaway for Alonso is glaring: this young squad, still recovering from the tornado of recent seasons, doesn't need galaxy-brain setups. They need consistent selection, simple automatisms, and the breathing room to function like a normal football club. 🚶🏻 Before they can run, Chelsea need to be taught how to walk. FULL ANALYSIS fourfourtwo.visitlink.me/iQe…

Yassine is ridiculous. Away from PSG, you can't find another better winger than him in Ligue 1.

Solve one problem at a time. Don't solve one and create two more. Cherki, Bouaddi and Anderson works really well from a technical-tactical standpoint, and I've been saying it since our defeat to Villa. Bouaddi anchors at the base, screening the back line and giving us security in build-up against an aggressive press. Anderson connects the phases, carries, and arrives late in the box. And with Cherki, you get creation from every front: from the wide men isolating 1v1, and from him receiving between the lines, turning, and threading passes into the half-spaces. Starting Enzo F instead shifts the entire creative burden onto the wide men, who then get doubled and tripled, and it heaps extra workload onto Bouaddi & Anderson OOP, because Enzo doesn't screen, doesn't counter-press with any intensity and leaves gaps in our rest defence. Keep Enzo F on the bench. Bring him on for Cherki when things aren't happening and you need fresh legs or a different rhythm. That's balance. Yeah, that’s solving problems, not creating them.

Chelsea goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez has seen a specialist about getting a mask fitted. The hope is that he can return earlier than slated but his exact return date remains to be confirmed.

#MUFC players have a day off today so Michael Carrick is not expected to be at Carrington. Still no news on his future communicated to him at this point. Boardroom talks expected this morning. @talkSPORT