Chelsea’s setup isn’t working – from back to front

After a painful Chelsea defeat to Sunderland where the Blues’ attack failed to fire, Enzo Maresca will be wishing he had some real life FIFA coins on hand to splash on a new forward.

Things just aren’t working out in this current setup.

The optimistic way of looking at it is that we haven’t seen the true plan in action yet. By the looks of things, the idea was to have Liam Delap up front, Joao Pedro in the hole, then Cole Palmer on the right. Or perhaps Delap up front with Palmer and JP behind as twin tens. Either way, the early injury to summer signing Delap plus Palmer’s persistent problems have meant we haven’t seen either.

But even then, even the players on the pitch aren’t producing to the level they should be. Chelsea finished the game with less than 1 xG created. Playing at home against a newly promoted team, that’s not nearly good enough. In fact, a deeper look shows they had just 0.4 xG from open play.

We’re without Palmer and Delap, but the options Maresca has at his disposal are more than good enough to put up one measly xG from open play. We’re watching plenty of managers do a lot more with a lot less across Europe right now.

As for the defence – where do you even start? They concede to a long throw, when we all knew that was likely to be Sunderland’s main weapon in the game.

Then the second goal is just shameful. Maresca barely knew what to say at full time. Brian Brobbey was able to just stand in our box for 9 seconds while players arrived in support. Nobody took responsibility, a sure sign of the inexperience which continues to plague this team.

The manager was able to switch things up at half time against Nottingham Forest and get a result. But he didn’t produce the same thing at all on Saturday. The changes he did make were odd and the ones he didn’t make even odder.

Maresca exudes confidence and competence in his demeanour, but when you look at the in-game decisions he makes in the cold light of day, they don’t add up. Taking off Josh Acheampong destabilised us at the back, and waiting an hour to make his first attacking change and then 76 minutes to make the second was criminally slow.

Delap and Palmer will be back eventually, but until then we could be in real trouble.