Chelsea manager Xabi Alonso oversaw an open training session at Sydney’s Allianz Stadium on Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
The ticketed event offered a first glimpse of the Spaniard’s methods, with travelling and local media invited to watch ahead of his first match in charge against Western Sydney Wanderers at Accor Stadium on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
With senior players including Cole Palmer, Joao Pedro and Levi Colwill involved, BBC Sport observed the session and picked out several early indications of what the future might look like under the former Real Madrid and Bayer Leverkusen manager.<\/p>\n
Firstly, Chelsea held a centre-circle huddle before moving into a pre-match warm-up and then a rondo, a possession-based exercise in which players stand in a circle while one player in the middle attempts to win the ball.<\/p>\n
The session then moved on to a series of possession-based exercises, then there was a crossing and finishing exercise. <\/p>\n
It was notable that Alonso had a large coaching staff working in a well-drilled manner, but there was no preference shown to established stars such as Palmer over players such as Reggie Watson and Mahdi Nichol-Jazuli, the two 16-year-olds in the squad.<\/p>\n
There were 4,500 fans in attendance and they showed impressive knowledge of the squad, encouraging staff members such as Willie Isa and Calum McFarlane to wave to them. There was also a contingent of Kazakh fans present to support new striker Dastan Satpaev.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chelsea manager Xabi Alonso oversaw an open training session at Sydney’s Allianz Stadium on Sunday evening. The ticketed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712055,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-712054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}