Chelsea fans planning their ideal team for tomorrow night’s game against Brighton are finding themselves in an interesting position.
Many of them are picking the exact same XI that faced Nottingham Forest at the weekend. That was in itself the same team that faced West Ham in the previous game. Naming unchanged lineups is a luxury that Mauricio Pochettino simply hasn’t had thanks to endless injuries. Naming the same team THREE games in a row is something he can only have dreamed of.
But despite the way that this current setup is functioning, there are a lot of players back on the bench now who will be pushing to play. The Forest game saw us with perhaps our strongest bench yet, and a host of those names will feel ready for starts now they’ve got more days of training under their belt.
Possible changes to the happy formula
There are certainly some tweaks possible. The most likely would seem to be Malo Gusto coming in at right back, with Trevoh Chalobah switching into the middle to replace Benoit Badiashile. This is the move that Pochettino made midway through the game against Forest, which worked well.
We could then see Reece James brought on in the second half as relief for Gusto.
The other change we see as possible involves Mykhailo Mudryk on the left wing. The rest of the team feels very settled, but Pochettino will likely be tempted to start Raheem Sterling, who came on and scored last weekend. But even that feels like it will be easy to resist. Mudryk scored the opener in that game, and Pochettino will want to build his confidence, not destroy it.
Unless there are injury or fatigue issues we don’t know about, we could well see an unchanged team named for the third game in a row.
