Nizaar Kinsella may have moved to the BBC, but he’s still got a close eye on Chelsea, and today he defended the club following their battering on Monday Night Football last night.
Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville slammed the Blues for their endless spending and bloated squad. They said it was impossible to have harmony at the training ground with so many players around.
Kinsella responded in a Tweet today that realistically, it’s just 26 players, a totally normal amount for a Premier League squad:
“Sanchez; Bettinelli, Petrovic*, Jorgensen; James, Cucurella, Chilwell*, Tosin, Colwill, Gusto, Badiashile, W Fofana; Veiga, Lavia, Caicedo, Dewsbury-Hall, Fernandez, Chukwuemeka*; Mudryk, Madueke, Jackson, Nkunku, Guiu, Palmer, Sterling*, Neto.”
He added that those with asterisks are “expected to leave”, making it just 22 in theory, although we wouldn’t count on the club being able to move them all on in the next couple of weeks, especially given they include some of the club’s top earners. Kinsella has also left Axel Disasi off his list. So it’s 27, or 23 with expected departures.
There's criticism of Chelsea's squad size but Maresca has only a slightly oversized group at the moment:
Sanchez; Bettinelli, Petrovic*, Jorgensen; James, Cucurella, Chilwell*, Tosin, Colwill, Gusto, Badiashile, W Fofana; Veiga, Lavia, Caicedo, Dewsbury-Hall, Fernandez,…
— Nizaar Kinsella (@NizaarKinsella) August 20, 2024
A major elephant
There is one major elephant in the room when making this point however – the massive group of senior players not working with Enzo Maresca. They may not be considered for first team action, but they’re there at the training ground being paid wages by the club, watching their careers disappear and their values diminish:
“Kepa, Broja, Datro Fofana, Lukaku, Chalobah, Casadei, Angelo, Bergstrom, Deivid Washington, Anjorin, Matos, Vale.”
Pretending there are just 26 players at Cobham is simply disingenuous, and it would be foolish to claim that having a group of outcasts one pitch over is not going to cause any disharmony. Still, with plenty of loans to be concluded, that second group can be shrunk quite rapidly in the next couple of weeks. It will require a remarkably busy fortnight, but things can still be returned to relative normality quite quickly.
