LONDON — In principle, Liam Rosenior’s approach on Tuesday night made sense. Away to a superior opponent in the EFL Cup semifinal second leg, trailing by a fine margin, you could talk yourself into waiting an hour before really applying yourself on the contest in any meaningful way.
In practice, this proved to be an almighty misjudgement from an inexperienced head coach, one that ended in the cruellest fashion for Chelsea, downed by the man they once celebrated as the best on earth, Kai Havertz, slapping the Arsenal badge in delight after rounding Robert Sanchez and slotting home. It was just the wake-up call his old club needed, the moment to draw a bit of impetus out of the Blues. Unfortunately, it came in the 97th minute in a 1-0 win for the Gunners.
For too many of those before, Chelsea had been content to let this contest drift vaguely towards a stalemate, in the hope that a set piece might swing the day or, far more unlikely, Arsenal might hand them a route back into the game with an error. There were some intriguing quirks around the edges, a couple of tweaks with and without the ball that asked tricky questions of their hosts. What there was not was any real evidence of a plan to move the ball into the sort of areas where Kepa Arrizabalaga might really be tested.
First of all, the mitigations. Rosenior noted post-match that he had been unable to name his team until the afternoon of the game as he sweated on the fitness of his stars. Cole Palmer’s minutes had to be carefully managed, and there was extra time to consider. “He is a gem,” said Rosenior. “We have to take care of him and make sure he’s right for the whole season. When he came on, his moments were top.”
Rosenior revealed after the game that both Pedro Neto and Reece James had been laid low with small knocks while he was glowing in his praise of Estevao, who had been absent on compassionate grounds over the weekend but flew back from Brazil. That is four of the players most likely to deliver something from nothing, none of them seeing the pitch until an hour had been played.
Those are enough selection headaches for an experienced head coach. Rosenior is not that. Arteta had tried and failed at his last four semifinals. His opponent’s experience of knockout ties doesn’t extend far beyond Conference League qualifiers, a couple of games in the FA Cup and Coupe de France and that trip to Napoli where the stakes only amounted to saving themselves two more matches. If Rosenior did get this wrong, well, he is early enough in his managerial career to learn from it.
It is also one thing to say that Chelsea should have had a go at Arsenal, another for that to have translated into any meaningful issues for the best defense on the planet. When William Saliba is this imperious, there’s no getting past him. Certainly not when you’ve started out with a five-man defense and Liam Delap as a quasi right winger, one whose most meaningful contributions came in the shoving matches with Piero Hincapie. Enzo Fernandez offered only a little more off the left flank, too many attacks coming to a juddering halt when he concluded that the best approach was to swing from range.
There is keeping yourself in the tie, and there is wasting your own time. In the first half in particular, Chelsea’s build-up was agonizingly slow, their speed of build-up barely any quicker than an Arsenal side that could use the clock as their friend. Even when holding your stars in reserve, you might as well try to get the ball up to the other guys with any sense of urgency.
“You can come away from home, press all over the pitch man for man and you could go 2-0 up or you could go 2-0 down,” said Rosenior.
There are, however, levels between chucking your team forward in pursuit of the ball and this meandering to the hour mark. You don’t have to go full gegenpressing to register more than one ball recovery in the attacking third as Chelsea did. It is not a cavalier approach to build up to pass the ball forward more than 27% of the time. At no stage were Arsenal drawn forward in a way that might open up avenues for the counter. The first half ended on three shots to three, 0.18 xG to 0.16 but at least the hosts had a few nearly moments with Gabriel’s passes over the top to Gabriel Martinelli and Eberechi Eze. The team pushing for a stalemate were the one who would be eliminated by such a scenario.
In keeping it tight, Rosenior might have thought there were hang-ups to play on. Instead, he gave Arsenal the chance to ride through some trickier earlier moments, Gabriel’s struggling to work the ball past the Chelsea press with short passes — though there were some dangerous clips over the top — and Hincapie’s occasionally lax sense early on of where the danger was. These were vulnerabilities to examine further but instead time was afforded for Arsenal’s outstanding defenders to ease themselves into the game.
It seemed that one of the leading considerations in Chelsea’s strategy was an attempt to prey on Arsenal’s nerves and see if the Emirates Stadium might get on their players’ backs. At home to one of their leading rivals. With Wembley in sight. The Gunners’ fanbase might have a reputation for irascibility and irrationality but not insanity.
“I felt that the psychological aspect of the tie was very important. I felt in the stadium as well, 60 minutes, I bring on Cole and Estevao, the game opens up and we have moments in and around the box. I think there was a feeling in the stadium that this tie could turn.,” Rosenior said.
Mikel Arteta knows this crowd a little better.
“They brought so much energy and belief to the team in different moments,” he said of his supporters. “They were great and it wasn’t easy today because it was a late kick-off, windy, rainy, cold and they responded. The energy was very good from the beginning. I sensed it was different and they are on board.”
The Emirates Stadium has seen Arsenal deal with bigger threats than Estevao and Palmer, talented though both are. If anyone was struggling with the psychological aspect of the tie, it seemed to be Chelsea. Neither side were angelic on the discipline front but the Blues’ 12 fouls had a particular quality of slowing the game down. So did the two minutes and change wasted when Joao Pedro and Wesley Fofana thought they’d build a mini-wall in front of Arrizabalaga as Palmer stood over a free kick. It was an awful lot of time wasted for a shot that slammed straight into the wall.
Rosenior was keen to dismiss criticism of his tactics as a view in “hindsight” to what had happened but it was clear in the midst of this game that the great charge promised by those changes never really came. In the 25 minutes that followed, Chelsea found themselves with a smidge more total touches and notably fewer in the final third. They were hemmed in, baited into the sort of long balls that Saliba and Gabriel love to mop up. The ball came to Palmer and Estevao when they went to get it, not when Chelsea found space between the lines.
On a more basic level, Chelsea set Arsenal a clear task: hold firm for half an hour. When Declan Rice stuck out one of those telescopic legs to snare possession from Palmer, you knew this was a challenge that Arsenal were up for.
“Going into the game today, we knew we had the lead in the tie,” Rice told CBS Sports after the game. “We didn’t want to put any pressure on ourselves … Today wasn’t just about playing nice football, it was about heart, desire and how much you want to win a game of football.”
Not for the first time in their recent meetings, Chelsea looked like the side who seemed to grasp the specifics of the game altogether more loosely than Arsenal. There was little to love about Arteta’s side, who were prepared to brawl their way to the finish line if that was what was required, but this wasn’t a game to earn admiration. It was the day to earn a berth in a final, and that placed very different demands on Arsenal than it did Chelsea.
Rosenior might have known how he wanted his team to deal with those, but it is quite another thing to execute a plan that ensures they can actually do so.
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