When the suggestion that Chelsea might sign Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall first emerged, it’s fair to say there was some confusion. We’re sure we wrote off the idea first, simply because it didn’t seem to add up.
There are a whole cluster of midfielders on the books already, and the club don’t seem to know what to do with them already. Adding more ingredients to a confused soup didn’t seem like the best idea.
But Dewsbury-Hall is now signed, and everyone is curious what that means for the team. Liam Twomey of the Athletic picked up on this and wrote an interesting piece summarising what Chelsea’s thinking might be.
He first looked at Dewsbury-Hall’s skillset and his season under Enzo Maresca at Leicester last year, and from that deduced what his Chelsea role might be.
As Twomey points out, Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo represent levels of investment so large that they have to play, in the first choice 3. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess, but Twomey reckons KDH “will fancy his chances of holding down a starting position as Chelsea’s most advanced midfielder… given the inexperience of the other obvious first team options available.”
The fate of his peers
The signing certainly puts Conor Gallagher’s future back into serious doubt, while the likes of Romeo Lavia and Lesley Ugochukwu will have to push to show their new manager they can be relied upon fitness wise.
Players like Carney Chukwuemeka and Cesare Casadei now feel like they could be sold without ever really getting a fair crack at the first team.
Twomey also points out that the presence of KDH in the middle likely means that Cole Palmer will return to be a regular on the right wing, rotating with Noni Madueke, and strangely making the former Leicester man to some degree an alternative to Michael Olise, who has gone to Bayern Munich.
