football | january '23 | ødegaard

The owners look at Mikel Arteta’s situation at Arsenal as an example to follow. He has been the subject of considerable criticism from fans over the years since his appointment in December 2019, and the team’s poor showing over the run-in last season led to more demands for his dismissal. And yet, only a few months on, he is now revered having led the team to the top of the table.

It has been noted Arteta was given several transfer windows in which to shape his squad, as well as integrate the north London club’s young talent into the senior setup. Chelsea want to give Potter the opportunity to emulate that success. The club have backed him in the market with the signings of Benoit Badiashile and Joao Felix in particular this month. There could be up to three further additions this month, with a midfielder a priority while Chelsea have also opened talks over a potential deal to sign PSV Eindhoven’s England Under-21 winger Noni Madueke.

The hierarchy have gone to great lengths to build a recruitment team to work alongside the 47-year-old head coach with the remodelled department now including two of Potter’s trusted allies from Brighton in Paul Winstanley and Kyle Macauley.

Where would that leave them if Potter was dismissed and someone else hired so soon?

Whenever Chelsea suffer a downturn in results, speculation mounts over whether a coach has lost the dressing room. Yet talk of mutiny is premature in Potter’s case, even if sources close to senior players, who have been granted anonymity to protect relationships, have indicated there are individuals who are unsettled and want to leave in the summer.

You could argue that is the case at Chelsea every year regardless and generally the feeling towards Potter remains positive. It has helped that he and his backroom staff have been open and approachable at Cobham from the start.

Potter does plenty of tactical work but the biggest impression he’s made on players has been as a person. The former Brighton coach keeps up a good level of communication with those not selected, a wise move to maintain morale.

One thing that has been noted by the players though is the difference in his team talks on match-day compared to those of his predecessor.

Take the resounding loss at Manchester City last Sunday when they trailed 3-0 at the break.

Under Tuchel, the players would have expected to be met with anger and harsh words during the interval. Potter opted more to encourage them in the hope of sparking a recovery at the Etihad Stadium. Even when that came to nothing, he maintained his calm after the final whistle too, stressing the importance of sticking together. Things will turn around.

The amount of injuries currently limiting Potter’s options has also been taken into account, although there is concern that the absence of Reece James, in particular, seems to affect the side so detrimentally.

At least James is back in light training and should be available for selection next month. Chelsea currently have 11 players unavailable for selection including one through suspension:

Mendy; Chilwell, Fofana, James; Pulisic, Loftus-Cheek, Kante, Zakaria, Sterling; Broja, Felix

The club have started a review of the medical department given all the injury setbacks endured this season. They had issues on that front last season, too, but squad members have been unsettled by seeing veteran members of staff — medical director Paco Biosca, head physio Thierry Laurent and wellness consultant Vinay P Menon — depart over the last four months.

As one source close to a senior player, granted anonymity to protect relationships, told The Athletic: “The new staff will obviously have qualifications, but the players have lost people they are comfortable with. Someone who knows their bodies. With a new medical team, you don’t have the same relationship yet.

“That will come in time. It’s going to take a while to familiarise yourself not just with their bodies, but how they react to things, to different methods. (Things like) players saying how they want to be massaged.

“At difficult times on the field, you want consistency off the field, but that isn’t the same either. Sometimes it’s not about the medical treatment you get, it’s seeing that familiar face, someone who can lift the mood. They know you.

“For some of them they feel like they have lost a confidant, a friendly face.”

The absence of so many players, combined with the number of new arrivals, has complicated the process of building up the kind of understanding team-mates need out on the pitch. There is sympathy from some for Potter as he is practically being forced to pick a different side every week. A level of awkwardness is inevitable.

There is already an admission that some mistakes were made in the summer transfer window, where they spent in excess of £250 million on eight players. The consortium feel they have learnt some valuable lessons from that splurge, particularly when it comes to overpaying for players.

The negotiations with Benfica for Fernandez, when the Portuguese club insisted on the £106 million release clause being paid only for Chelsea to refuse to lift their offer beyond £85 million, was an indication that they are wiser to the vagaries of the market these days.

Yet they are still blighted by legacies of the previous ownership.

It was the Abramovich regime who failed to negotiate new contracts with international defenders Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen. Both departed on free transfers at the end of last season and are contributing in La Liga with Real Madrid and Barcelona respectively.

As much as Tuchel is revered — the away support sang his name at the Etihad stadium last Sunday — he won fewer than half of his last 30 Premier League games in charge, an indication that a decline was already under way. The German’s sour relationship with Romelu Lukaku led to the forward seeking a return to Inter Milan on loan despite there being no experienced striker in the squad to replace him.

Questions should be asked as to why Chelsea eventually bought Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, a player with whom Tuchel enjoyed a special bond from their time together at Borussia Dortmund, only to sack the head coach a week later. Aubameyang, who has scored just three times since joining from Barcelona, would not have expected their reunion to be so brief. The change in management unsettled him.

By n8 dogg Go To PostI think that if Ake plays at LB, it’s manageable enough. Got a feeling a Lewis-Foden left side would cause a lot of trouble though.

Casemiro is the key today. Keep De Bruyne quiet and I’m confident we have a chance of a result.

Those who know Guardiola say he has been trying since the start of the season to get the best out of Haaland without breaking the false nine-led system that, over the past two years, has delivered back-to-back Premier League titles and a Champions League final (and almost a second).

In this context, Guardiola has two types of players in his squad: the ‘pausa’ players, who manage the rhythm of the game, and the destabilising players, who are more geared towards attacking.

His control players include Rodri, Ilkay Gundogan, Bernardo Silva, Jack Grealish and Riyad Mahrez. His destabilisers include Haaland, Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Joao Cancelo and Julian Alvarez.

Guardiola’s line-ups, going back to Barcelona and Bayern Munich, have always been about finding the right balance and at the mid-point of the 2020-21 season, he found a winning formula with City that oozed control — and it did not involve a traditional striker. Introducing Haaland to the team is one of the two main reasons City are at the mid-point of this season still trying to find their rhythm (the other one is the World Cup break).

There are numerous ways he looks for control and it’s not always as obvious as what team he picks — a player’s instructions can change from one minute to the next and different partnerships can have different outcomes — but perhaps the most obvious option, probably his go-to one and the most controversial in the stands and on social media, is playing Grealish and Mahrez out wide.

He has come to favour those two because they both excel in four particular areas: they stay open on the wings, they press with intensity, they rarely lose the ball and they understand when to speed the game up and when to slow it down (the ‘pausa’ element).

And it cannot be stressed enough how important slowing down the game is to Guardiola.

“We should spend more time in the final third, give more passes in that moment,” Guardiola said after the chaotic 3-3 draw at Newcastle earlier this season. In that game, City had been attacking quickly and directly, but that was seen as part of their problem.

“But it’s difficult because Erling is going, Phil has this aggression to go,” Guardiola continued. “If Jack plays there or Riyad or Bernardo play on the right, they are calmer and they help us to be all together, and when we lose the ball we are there and they cannot run.”

If City attack spaces quickly and they score (or at least the ball goes out of play), they either don’t have to regroup quickly or they get the opportunity to do so. The problem against Newcastle was that the moves either broke down or the shots were saved and stayed in play, allowing Eddie Howe’s team to counter-attack. Because City had attacked so quickly, the midfielders and defenders did not have time to catch up and get in the right position to try to win the ball back.

This was yet another reminder to Guardiola of the importance of control.

If there is a chance to attack quickly he encourages it but there are strict instructions not to force it.

In fact, once Guardiola leaves City and his reign and career are looked at in totality, it will probably become clear that he has become more conservative in recent years.

If this were in the Marvel universe, the origin story of this shift in approach would be chaotic defeats and/or Champions League eliminations at the hands of Liverpool and Tottenham between 2017 and 2020, and others in this period, where things got out of hand and City suffered on the counter-attack.

He wanted to put a stop to that and the false-nine system of early 2021 not only moved City out of their relative slump around Liverpool winning the title, but it also gave City the control Guardiola wanted and delivered trophies and progress in Europe.

City lost to Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final last season after losing control for three or four minutes at the end of normal time in the second leg. Guardiola’s reaction to that was not to look for less control — by throwing caution to the wind — but to seek more. The Newcastle game is another example, while the final 20 minutes of the 6-3 Manchester derby win in October, when United scored twice, is another.

Guardiola would always be happier with a balanced game that City don’t win than an unbalanced game that they do.

There have been calls for Guardiola to embrace the attacking quality in his team, to let Haaland, Foden, De Bruyne et al off the leash and wreak havoc, and they would surely win games that way. Guardiola is not that way inclined. He believes that how City played earlier in his reign, with Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane on the wings, would not be as successful now because teams defend against them in different ways, limiting the spaces for these kinds of direct wingers.

Grealish and Mahrez are generally used against deep defences because they have different gears to their game and know when to play fast and when to play slow, but Guardiola is constantly looking for new ways to find control.

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By bud Go To Postcity look so beatable.

united doing well, i think.

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wouldn't be surprised if he exposes arteta yet again.