PicoBlog

Chelsea were looking for back-to-back wins for only the 2nd time in the league this season to try to build momentum finally. It was on a tough away day against Luton Town where every team finds it hard to get points from. Let’s see how that unfolded…

Chelsea lined up with their usual 4231 with Broja, Jackson on the left, Palmer as the 10, and Noni given a chance from the start.

Luton used their own usual 343 formation using wingback.

Chelsea's shape was mostly a 3-2-5 but a more narrow version since there was hardly any width on the left with Colwill and Jackson preferring to play inside. Gallagher or Palmer dropped to join Caicedo in the build-up. That was not great balance, but it didn’t matter much as Chelsea relied on transitions to take advantage of the space Luton left while pressing.

While in shape, Palmer regularly dropped deep to provide an option to progress the ball which made it look like a 3-3 shape like we saw in preseason when we saw Carney doing it.

Luton at home as always planed to take the game to the opposition no matter who they are, meaning they will press hard and not give time to the opposition to play their game. So Luton pressed Chelsea high from the very start and mostly throughout the game.

Chelsea initially tried to play out of it from goal kicks, but quickly realised they wouldn’t get much joy out of it because of the way Luton started their press really high. It gave Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Spurs and Newcastle problems too. Chelsea started bypassing it by playing long balls to the forwards to hold up and in behind for Broja and Jackson. It started many Chelsea attacks, so it gave Luton problems in the first half.

Broja, especially in the first half, did a good job of holding the ball up and bringing his teammates into play, neat and tidily, it was the best I’ve seen him at that this season (his 2nd half performance was a mirror image).

Jackson also was a ball magnet in the final third but when he dropped much deeper in between the lines to pick up the ball in the half turn and spin his markers; Mengi hated the sight of him today. It was also apparent in Chelsea’s 3rd goal.

But even that didn’t give us control in the game as Luton managed to win most of the 2nd balls, because our players weren’t close enough to recover the 2nd balls. We were just very clinical with the chances we had.

Chelsea mostly created their chances in transitions (our strongest attacking weapon). This was done either by sending the ball long like we described earlier, or through slick quick passes from back to front. We were not playing out from goal kicks, but when we passed the ball back to Petrovic and started again, we broke out of the press well and got forward, which was a staple of 2 of the 3 goals we scored in the game. The pace of Noni, Jackson, Broja, and the positioning of Palmer, caused them problems all game.

There was this move particularly we executed time and time again with Jackson dropping deep to receive a Colwill pass and Colwill taking advantage of the space in the first half.

Chelsea also reacted well when we lost the ball in the counter-press (in the first half) and used that to create chances as well.

I’ve been on about the space we give out against teams in our wide areas since preseason. We did it against Palace and again in this game. It puts lots of emphasis on the FBs to win their 1v1 duels. Both teams tried to use long balls to exploit the space quickly in wide areas with quick switches of play.

Luton used lots of switches of play to find the wide man 1v1 a lot of the time. Gusto and Colwill won most of them early on with help. But Luton also tried to overload those wide areas with in-seam runs (runs in between the CB and Fullback) to create through crosses. Chelsea dealt with it well 1st half because Disasi and Silva were quick to cover those half-space runs, but not as well in the 2nd half.

Our wingers did lots of work to prevent much of that in the first half as Noni and Jackson tracked back brilliantly to deny Luton many chances to cross or find space in the box for shots.

Chelsea also generally did well to prevent those crosses in the box from becoming substantial chances. Luton didn’t have a shot on target until the 79th minute. Chelsea just seemed to wilt under the pressure of Luton in the end. We'll come to that.

But in the 2nd half, Rob Edwards brought on more direct ball carriers that can run at people in midfield in Ogbene, and particularly Chong, who disrupted Chelsea's shape time and time again with his ball carrying. It attracted players to him like dribblers do and left spaces centrally and out wide for Luton to exploit.

All the above started happening with increasing regularity from the 77th minute. We were trying to press but at the same time leaving too many gaps between the lines. We weren’t compact and it allowed Luton time to easily get into our half time and time again. We didn’t manage it well from there. It brought up familiar issues from games like Man Utd and Man City amongst others this season.

The defence no longer followed the midfield to press, Caicedo looked like a sole sailor out in the Atlantic Ocean. Luton would then easily get numbers which outnumber us in the box. That’s why we were not defending the box well, how do you do that when you are outnumbered?

They kept putting in crosses upon crosses and we are very poor at defending crosses in our box, especially at our back post because the opposition always outnumbers our defenders 5 to 4 when attacking the box. So the farthest man was always getting on the end of crosses and the set pieces on indirect freekicks.

Poch was slow to react to this, especially after 3 goals down when the Luton manager made his changes to attack the game. He should have brought Gilchrist immediately after the 3rd goal or not even far from it within the last 15 minutes. The disallowed goal should have been the trigger because we needed to cover the wide areas by going 5v5 against Luton to see the game out, especially when it is clear how chaotic Luton’s second-half performances have been this season in their favour. If not for Petrovic and Silva, we should have conceded much more.

Very shortly after Gilchrist came on and Poch changed to a 5 at the back, we were able to put Luton at arm’s length and see out the game.

We managed to scrape out with a win from this game which we made harder for ourselves in the end as much as it was tough for the top sides to come here. We were comfortably 3 up in the 70th minute with Luton hardly having a threatening moment. Letting Luton back into the game the way we did is something that should never repeat itself from Poch and the team. Experiences like this will help a lot.

There were still positives from the performances of Palmer with 3 goal contributions, Noni showing he can start consistently in this team with not only a goal but an imperious defensive performance, and Jackson with another reminder of why we will miss him when he goes to AFCON with a brilliant assist and performance.

For all the issues we’ve had this season, our attackers have been very much amongst the goals. We’ve scored 34 goals, 4 goals less than the entire last season. 3 points and back-to-back wins for the 2nd time this season meant we ended the year 2023 in high spirits, n view of a far better 2024.

Seun

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