An entire season’s worth of work in the Champions League was thrown away in fifteen minutes of madness last night, as Chelsea gifted a third goal to PSG, then gave up two more in the final minutes to effectively put this Round of 16 tie to bed. As the old adage goes: you cannot win a tie in the first leg but you sure can lose it, and in those fifteen minutes, we did precisely just that. Sure, technically it’s not over. We did beat PSG 3-0 in the Club World Cup final. I doubt that’ll happen again
next week.
And it’s truly too bad because for large parts of the game, we were at least the equals of the defending Champions of Europe. Chelsea came back twice to equalize and were inches away from doing so a third time. But our maddening habit of shooting ourselves in the foot in wild and increasingly creative ways came to the fore once again. Filip Jörgensen stands out, obviously, but he didn’t pick himself to start, nor did he come up with the high-risk tactical plan of trying to play through PSG’s relentless high press. And it’s not on him that the defensive structure (rickety at best throughout) fully collapsed in the final ten minutes, or that we contrived to miss some excellent opportunities, one of which then directly led to a conceded goal with players losing containment on the counter.
“Players make mistakes. Filip’s not the first one to make a mistake. And that’s part of football. Obviously, it’s bitter… In that moment, at 2-2, I think we were in the ascendancy. We were an inch away from going even to 3-3. I think João Pedro’s goal was like an inch offside. But in the top level, in the Champions League level, it is fine margins. And the fifth goal was the most painful one, we don’t settle ourselves down. We don’t deal with the basic pattern of play. They score a fifth goal and make the tie very difficult for us.”
“[Jörgensen] has different qualities [than Sánchez] and one of his qualities, which he showed against Aston Villa, one of the reasons we won 4-1 at Aston Villa, we were so calm in our possession moments, which we weren’t before, not just on Rob but on the whole team. Coming here against a really high-pressing team, if you stay calm and play through the initial pressure, you can cause a lot of problems, which we did. It’s just painful that we’ve made that mistake in that moment to make the game 3-2 and now we are in a very, very difficult position in this tie now with the end result.”
None of that absolves Jörgensen from one of the worst goalkeeping displays in … well, about 24 hours, after Tottenham’s Antonín Kinský did something very similar, just at the start of their game. We did concede five goals from an xG of less than one, after all.
But it also doesn’t absolve Liam Rosenior himself of the consequences of his own decisions, from making the fateful choice of benching the statistically much better Robert Sánchez (in actual goalkeeping stats), or from the baffling lack of substitutions at first (no fresh legs until the 83rd minute), then the even more baffling pattern of substitutions late (shades of Claudio Ranieri in Monaco, some 23 years ago).
“We’ve spoken a lot about this aspect, discipline, staying calm in the moment. It’s on me to find the answer because what we won’t speak about now, rightly so, was so much good in our play. It doesn’t matter because we’re here to win. We’ve made this tie, we’ve kind of shot ourselves in the foot and made this tie very, very difficult but not impossible to come back from.
“[…] I need us to maintain our calm in the moment when we have setbacks. This is on me. It’s not a blame of the team. It’s something that we’ve spoken about from my first day coming in, about reacting positively, about staying calm in moments and it’s not happened. That’s why it’s on me. That’s not pointing the finger of blame at the players. The intensity of our press, some of our football, some of the chances we created was outstanding. If we don’t overcome this hurdle, we won’t reach our potential and it’s my job to find the answer to it.
“[…] For much of the game, I was really, really happy with our performance. The last 15, 20 minutes were crazy in many aspects. That’s on me. I need to be better in moments, setbacks, mistakes happen. But you have to stay calm in the moment, me included. And we didn’t, and we were punished by a very good team, which makes the scoreline a painful one because for 75 minutes, we were in the tie and the game itself.”
-Liam Rosenior; source: Football.London
Rosenior, like after the losses against Arsenal, took the blame onto himself, but as always, that’s largely just a performative gesture. Our shortcomings, on and off the pitch, were brutally exposed once again — baffling decisions galore from the players, coaches, and of course the people responsible for putting this team together in the first place.
The manner of this defeat will sting for a while, and it could derail the rest of the already precariously balanced season as well. How we react to it, on the pitch and in the dressing room, will be critical to any hopes we may yet have this season.
