Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
I think people overstate the downtooled thing. If your manager screams at you all week or drops you for a month because you made exciting daring attacking passes and a few got intercepted then players stop doing that, and that kills an offence. I think that is what happened with Utd, someone screaming at them to not attack, not support counters in numbers and after a while players just stop trying which makes the situation worse. It's not that they aren't working hard, but they are being asked to work hard doing other things.
In Chelsea's case you've got a manager saying no, play this way not that way, and that includes moving their most effective ball winner, defensive midfielder and all around great player out of his best position just so another player can sit in the same position and I honestly don't even know what, he's not achieving anything there.
I'm a long time fan of pointing out that defensive midfielders don't have to only defend and that it's a waste if they do. Gilberto got quite a lot of goals for us yet was the best defensive midfielder in the league by a mile. Kante is brilliant defensively, great at controlling that area of the pitch but able to burst forward and support attacks.
I find players like Jorginho pointless, if you can have a player in a position who does a single thing well but sucks at 3 other things, or a player who is equally capable of passing the ball around quickly but also excellent at winning it back, excellent at driving it forwards, excellent at tackling and excellent at making throughballs then you just have a better team using the second player. Jorginho in every performance I've seen looks limited as hell.
The only way someone like him works is if other players pick up the slack from his limitations and if they don't or if the teams they are playing at better at exploiting his weakness there is simply no space for him to be in the squad over someone better rounded as a player.
Sarri's point blank refusal to adapt his system or drop Jorginho is basically forcing the Chelsea team to walk into such performances.
Then you have Alonso who is playing like crap, Luiz who has always been a massive liability, barkley... really, and spending half the season playing Hazard out of position. It's just one dumb decision after another but the players get dropped if they don't do what Sarri tells them to, it's not their fault that he's playing out of form players or that his system is a joke. They aren't playing well but every decision he makes basically sets them up for this.
