Another week has passed, and Chelsea have put another disappointing result on the board. A run of easier games which should have been a chance to turn a poor season around has ended up just serving to reminding everyone how far off the expected level this team are.
If you weren’t bored of hearing the same excuses back in October, you certainly will be by now. Graham Potter pointed to the quality of the opposition, the players out injured or unfit, the new arrivals settling in. We can recite his post match “disappointed but we move on and look to keep improving” speech almost word for word now.
It’s only fair that Potter has the chance to manage expectations, and those reasons are all valid to some degree. But you they don’t tell the whole story, clearly. Chelsea’s best players on Saturday were Joao Felix and Enzo Fernandez in attack, and Benoit Badiashile in defence. All January arrivals, all playing well from the moment they pulled on a Blue shirt.
There’s no doubt all of these players can improve with more time spent on the pitch together. And nobody is expecting perfection – just progress. But so far, there has been desperately little of it.