A lot of the discussion about Chelsea’s future over the weekend, following another dreary defeat, was about Enzo Fernandez.
The team’s results have been just as bad since he arrived on January deadline day as they were before he got here, but nobody doubts his amazing quality. He’s shown enough flashes of amazing ability that nobody is blaming him for our problems.
One common theme online was talking about buying a “6,” that is to say a defensively minded midfielder, to play alongside him and free him up to attack more, as an “8”.
That’s one way of doing it – but it’s not the only way. He’s got more than enough legs and tenacity to play as the deep man himself, if his midfield partners are willing to press ahead of him.
Sometimes the way to make a team better in attack isn’t just to move the best players further up the pitch, but rather to replace defensive minded players in deep positions with more forward thinking players.
I agree. I think the beauty of Enzo is that he appears to be the rare player capable of ably playing more than one midfield role and his versatility (especially at such a young age) makes him incredibly valuable. I think it’s less about sorting out his “best” position and more about figuring which combinations or midfielders (alongside Enzo) give us the best solution to the tactical challenge in front of us in any given week. Certainly, having Kante back means that with he, Enzo, and Kovacic when can field a midfield three to rival any in world. But when we opt to go with the 3-4-3 and can only play two of them, then we have to sort out which pairing works best given the opponent.