Chelsea’s win over West Ham on Saturday was one of the matches that Jamie Carragher looked at on last night’s Monday Night Football.
He made some really interesting notes about the Blues’ tactics during the game. He pointed to the inverting full backs who started the game – and were a complete disaster.
Advertisement
Chelsea’s backup full backs struggle in inverted role
Jamie Carragher’s analysis of Chelsea’s formation.
“Chelsea are 3-2-5 in possession, so you see the back three, the midfield pivot, and a front five. Now, this is nothing different to what Maresca did, we’ve seen Michael Carrick do it for Manchester United. Lots of teams build up like this. But what’s really interesting is the position of the full-backs in this setup.
“You’ve got Gusto at right-back, who’s part of the back three in the build up, and you’ve got your left-back, Hato, who comes and joins Caicedo as one of the double pivots.
Advertisement
“As we’ve highlighted with Liam Rosenior’s Chelsea, they always want to go through the middle. The ball comes central to Caicedo, they lose it there. This is 30 seconds into the game. Something that we saw a lot against Brentford, this happened all through the first half against West Ham.”
Luckily, the Blues were able to change things drastically at half time, both in terms of personnel and shape. They got into gear and scored 3 in the second half to run out winners by full time.
Rosenior, once again, picked a bad starting team then made the perfect adjustments to it.
Advertisement
You can see Carragher’s analysis of the full game in the clip embedded here:
In other news…
Alejandro Garnacho struggled in Chelsea’s game against West Ham, and at full time Gary Neville had some big questions about his future and his form.
A quiet January in terms of purchases was of course not what fans were looking for – but it does potentially open up Chelsea for another big summer. They have moves to make and should have the budget to make them.