The Carabao Cup final is still fresh in a lot of people’s minds, and it was interesting to hear the thoughts of a neutral journalist who was in the stadium to watch the game.
Ken Early’s comments on the Second Captains podcast summing up the game were pretty damning of Chelsea as a whole. He’s seen a lot of us over the last two years, and clearly isn’t impressed by the team as a whole.
He did have some special praise for one player – Cole Palmer. This wasn’t a game where Palmer really stood out (his most notable moment was a missed chance, after all) but he still always looks head and shoulders above the rest of the team, as Early pointed out:
“[Palmer] seems to the the only one who plays as though he’s got a brain. Honestly, he’s the only who both sees the right thing to do and is has a better than average chance of executing that thing. There’s still traces of Man City there that haven’t been totally washed away by becoming a Chelsea player.”
Of course he’s speaking a little tongue in cheek, and is exaggerating. But his exasperated tone reflects pretty well what most fans think.
Do we really think Enzo, for example, doesn’t have the brains or the skill to play well? Of course we don’t. But if the rest of the group would play to the best of their ability as well as Palmer does, we wouldn’t be lingered in mid table.
How many times do we have to remind ourselves of this group’s youth and inexperience??? Add to that the fact that they’ve had three different managers in the last 18 months and it’s no wonder they still look rough around the edges. Honestly, what right do we have to expect otherwise?
What they need more than anything else is consistency. Consistency of playing time and opportunities to make mistakes and learn, and consistency of instruction and support from the coaching staff.
The SuperFranks of the world keep expecting that this group will just suddenly turn up this season and play like a well-oiled machine full of veterans and that our billion pound outlay should enable us to simply skip over the parts where 20, 21, 22 and 23-year olds repeatedly “stub their toes,” but it just doesn’t work like that! Never has and never will. It doesn’t mean these players don’t know how to play the game. It’s simply a result of having most of the team at a particularly steep part of their learning curve as young footballers.
We can either understand this and support them through it, or we can do what too many so-called “supporters” are doing and rant and rave and criticize them endlessly. We can look back on how a similarly harsh approach from a certain Chelsea manager saw us miss out out on two generational talents (KDB and Salah) because they didn’t arrive at the club as “the finished product.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how idiotically shortsighted such an outlook is, but that doesn’t seem to stop SuperFrank and others from taking it!