If someone had told me prior to last night’s game that Chelsea were going to make history against West Ham United at Stamford Bridge, I would’ve bet a fair amount that something was about to go very, very wrong
for us. Good thing I’m not a betting man!
Granted, for the first 45 minutes, something was indeed going very, very wrong on for us. Namely, everything. Everything was going wrong. The energy, the execution, the quality — it was all lacking. West Ham barely had the ball, but they dominated the half, and were perhaps unfortunate to be up by only two.
Still, Chelsea had never come back to win from a 2-0 half-time deficit (or greater) in the Premier League era (i.e. since 1992).
Until now.
In his pre-match press conference, head coach Liam Rosenior called this the “biggest game of the season”, expecting to learn “so much” about how his squad might handle a smaller occasion, especially one coming immediately after a rousing and important comeback win in Naples, and just ahead of needing a rousing and important comeback against Arsenal in the second leg of the League Cup semifinal. It’s easy to get up for the big games. Can we match that in a game against the third worst team in the league? Can we keep the levels high? Can we execute consistently? Those sorts of questions have not been answered affirmatively for a while now.
Relegation-candidate West Ham’s visit to the Bridge had all the makings of a trap game. They’ve had a terrible season, but have hit a bit of form (three wins on the spin). And the margins between the best and the worst continue to shrink every year. Any team can beat any team in the Premier League on any given day, now more so than ever. We knew it, Rosenior knew it. He tried to rotate the squad, put the fresh legs out there, offering chances to impress. Many of those chances were not taken. The entire left flank was subbed at the half in a triple-change.
So what did Rosenior learn?
He kept the focus on the collective, as one might expect, though he did admit that our success will be predicated on him making the correct decisions with regards to squad selection. That’s true for any team of course, but we seem to be more sensitive to that factor than most — especially of the teams vying for the biggest honors. But we cannot achieve all our ambitions if we can ultimately only rely on just a dozen or so players. The fixture congestion is relentless, as always. And we’ve already seen what happens when we overplay the likes of Reece James, Cole Palmer, or Wesley Fofana, just to name a few.
“My biggest learning is there’s a spirit and a fight and a resilience in this group that I really, really like. I’ve demanded from the first day of stepping in. We don’t have many training sessions, but we spoke about reacting positively to setbacks. We’ve spoken about reactions to losing the ball, pressing, energy, intensity. All of that was there in the second half, which wasn’t there in the first half. I don’t put that just down to the changes I made.
“It’s very difficult. We’ve had so many games in a short space of time. I was fearful of a lack of energy and not energy or lack of application, but I felt our decision-making was really poor in the first half. When to keep the ball, when we pressed, we were just too far off it. West Ham were by far the better team. We had a reaction at half-time. The reaction of the team in the second half tells me that we’ve got something really, really special here if I can utilise the squad in the correct way.
“[…] Individually, collectively, our first-half performance was nowhere near the level that it needed to be and should be. The individuals came off and then people will look at them. That wasn’t on them. It was a collective. There was a collective poor performance in the first half. Those players know with me, I make early changes. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden they’re out of my thoughts at all. It was just a really lethargic performance in the first half, but the second half was everything I wanted to see.”
-Liam Rosenior; source: Football.London
All that said, this comeback was indeed truly epic — despite it being just a random league game at the end of the day, one of 38 in a season, its details likely forgotten in a not so distant future — and it should serve to keep building our confidence and winning mentality, if nothing else. For the culture!
