Two weeks ago, I was all geared up to write my ‘Pochettino out piece’. I was at the 4-2 defeat to Wolves and like every other home fan there, had been thoroughly disappointed by what I had seen. At the start of the season, my hopes were for Chelsea to have a couple of decent runs in the cups and to return to European competition. Not necessarily the Champions League, just European competition in general; the reason I say that is that the Premier League is so competitive for those European places that just getting into any UEFA competition at all is something to aim for. I think fans need to recalibrate their senses on that one. Brighton, Aston Villa and Newcastle United have all joined in the regular fight for European places that at least one Champions League quality team is going to miss out every season. So, I would have been happy with anywhere in the top seven or eight spots. But after that performance in early February I could not see any circumstances that would see the club even finishing in the top half of the table, never mind in those continental places. And that is something that I rarely do.
Even last season, as the wheels started to fall off for Graham Potter, I wanted to see him given time to try and turn things around and change the culture at the club, take the ideas that he had implemented with such success and make them work on a bigger scale. I wasn’t surprised when the board took the decision to sack Graham Potter, but I was saddened. Mikel Arteta and Arsenal, and Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool before, are showing the benefit of giving a manager the time and resources over a number of seasons to improve a club from top to bottom and go from a fallow period to regularly challenging for honours. Now, Mauricio Pochettino has shown that he can certainly improve a team and take them up the table as he did with in his stint across town at Tottenham. But he never managed the next bit; it all fell apart before he won anything as Tottenham manager.
The last three games have shown real promise though. There was the fabulous win in the F.A. Cup away to Aston Villa and that last gasp victory at Crystal Palace, as well as the very impressive draw away to Manchester City. It’s not so much the results that we’ve seen in those games, but the performances that the players have put in. The first hour against Aston Villa was some of the best football that Chelsea have played under Pochettino, full of desire and attacking swagger. It was the second half that impressed against Palace, after a lacklustre first-half. The changes made by Pochettino changed the way Chelsea were playing and they took over the second half. It was also possibly Conor Gallagher’s best performance in a Chelsea shirt. The match against Manchester City was, I felt, a credit to Pochettino and the coaching staff for the work they had done on the training pitch leading up to that game. Chelsea were able to get in behind City defensive line time after time and, with cooler heads, may well have gone into half-time further ahead than just one goal.
Before the season started, I thought it would take a little while for the squad to learn how to play the way that Mauricio Pochettino likes to implement. I thought we would start to see it really bed in and start to motor around January or February. But no-one expected the results that we have seen in the meantime. The talk coming from the insiders is that Chelsea will stick with Pochettino for the rest of the season and then review in the summer. I think that’s the smart thing to do. Chelsea are still in with a shout of finishing in the European places in the league, are still in the F.A. Cup with a decent chance of reaching at least the semi-final, and of course play the League Cup final tomorrow. After the Wolves game, I gave us no chance whatsoever to come away. Now, I have a ray of hope that we might just be able to disrupt the form book and bring in the first piece of silverware of the Boehly-Clearlake era.
Just a thought… What was the first trophy of the Abramovich era? Oh, yeah. The League Cup. Let’s hope history repeats itself.
Eat, Sleep, Blog, Repeat 