Chelsea’s team was pretty depleted by injury and rotation yesterday, only the midfield was deployed at full strength, not that it made much of a difference.
The Enzo Fernandez, Conor Gallagher, Moises Caicedo combination was run rings around as Arsenal scored 5 against us. The first player in that trio received a 5.48 rating on WhoScored. They announced today that that was the lowest rated match rating he’s ever recorded on their service.
We’re not surprised – his performances have been getting worse and worse as the season goes on. This seems partly down to his own fitness, and partly down to the total collapse of the system around him.
Of the 116 matches in his career so far that we have complete data for, Enzo Fernández's performance against Arsenal last night was the lowest rated (5.48). 😶 pic.twitter.com/vliF88sEcR
— WhoScored.com (@WhoScored) April 24, 2024
Perhaps most damning of all was the 6-0 win we had over Everton last Monday night, when Enzo sat out of the game rested. Gallagher and Caicedo seemed to dovetail much more as an energetic double pivot than they ever do trying to form a trio with Enzo.
We didn’t notice Enzo as any worse than the rest of his teammates last night. They all just looked resigned to defeat from the moment they stepped onto the pitch.
A continuing problem
The clamour for him now is to “have surgery” on the hernia problem which is apparently holding him back. We’re all on board with the theory of that. We certainly don’t want him risking anything more serious by delaying that process so that he can play our final games of the season.
But let’s face it, we don’t have all the information on that front, and without more detail on what’s happening it’s very silly to make judgments from the outside. One can’t weight up the different options without knowing the severity and consequences of each.
We’ll just have to hope the medical department make the right call – which, on current evidence, is a long shot.
I get that he’s playing through injury, but the problem with Enzo’s performance was not merely about fitness, it was about his failure to stay connected to his fellow midfielders. He has shown a worrying tendency to lose positional awareness and it opens up gaps that Arsenal exploited mercilessly. He’s being deployed as an 8, but he acts like he’s a 10, showing far too little commitment to helping the team keep its shape and be hard to breakdown. We simply can’t afford this, and Poch would do well to replace Enzo with Gallagher for the run-in.