Arsenal legend Ian Wright has revealed what he’s noticed about Chelsea and believes they will “dismantle” teams the way they play.
After Saturday’s convincing win against West Ham the Blues sit fifth in the Premier League with ten points from their first five games.
Other than the disappointing draw at home to Crystal Palace, Chelsea couldn’t have asked for a much better start to the season.
Wright speaks on Chelsea
Enzo Maresca made the big step up from Leicester over the summer and so far it seems he’s adapted well to the Premier League and his new surroundings.
The win against the Hammers saw Maresca become the first manager since Pep Guardiola in 2016 to win his first three away games in the Premier League.
It’s early days but you can already see a clear identity and patterns of play forming under the Italian and the players are getting more comfortable with how they are being asked to play.
Consecutive clean sheets has shown the Blues might be starting to get on top of the defensive issues they had last season and at the start of this campaign, whilst they have already demonstrated how dangerous they can be in attack.
Wright feels Chelsea are starting to click and believes if they carry on playing how they have been they will dismantle teams.
“What you see with Chelsea is that they’re starting to click,” Wright said as cited on X.com.
“With Palmer, with Jackson in that kind of form, Sancho with this new lease of life, with Caicedo, the way they playing, yes, they will dismantle teams.
“It depends on what we see when they play against the City and Arsenal, how they set up. We’ll find out more about Maresca. But in respect of everybody else, Chelsea, now is the team that’s coming, you can see it and you can see it in the manager as well.”
Next up for the Blues are two home games starting with Barrow in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday night before the visit of Brighton on Saturday.
What’s fascinating is that we got the West Ham win with less than 50% possession. Yes, we’re starting to see some familiar patterns of play, particularly the ability to launch lightning attacks before the opposition defense can get set, but there have actually been some tweaks in recent weeks. For example, we didn’t see Sanchez stepping up into the back line (and pushing a centre-half out to the wing) in the build up. Maresca seems to have decided that the team hadn’t mastered the ability to retain the ball in the middle third of the field and that moving the centre-half to the flank was leaving us too open on the counter. So, we sacrificed some possession, but we also limited the number of dangerous counter attacks we had to defend and picked up our second straight clean sheet in the process.