Look at the players, not Conte
IF TOTTENHAM take a point from the north London derby tomorrow, Chelsea will be out of the Champions League places by the time they face West Brom. Even if it does not happen this weekend, without swift improvement, it is simply a matter of time. This happened to Chelsea after their previous title-winning season, 2014-15, too. It would be a bad habit to get into.
The disappointing follow-up season does not now seem such an exceptional event, as it has happened three times recently. Manchester United failed to make the Champions League the year after winning the title in Sir Alex Ferguson’s final season; Leicester did, too. Yet, for both of those clubs there were exceptional circumstances. Ferguson’s departure took a bigger toll than could have been imagined; Leicester sold a key player in N’Golo Kante and found it impossible to maintain the momentum of a truly unique campaign.
Yet what was Chelsea’s excuse under Jose Mourinho? No change of manager, no change of personnel. And making the Champions League only requires a top-four finish. It wasn’t as if they had to climb Everest. Between Blackburn Rovers in 1995-96 and Manchester United in 2013-14, no English title winners failed to qualify for the Champions League the following season. It never happened to Ferguson or Arsene Wenger, to Chelsea in the early Roman Abramovich years or Manchester City. Yet, if they do not buck up, this group of Chelsea players will do it twice: and that begs explanation.
Antonio Conte dropped a heavy hint after Monday’s capitulation at Watford. ‘To play at a great club you must have personality, because it is simple to play when there is confidence,’ he said. Spot on. Conte is not the first Chelsea manager to look around the dressing-room and wonder what happened to his team of winners. On a roll, Chelsea are unstoppable, but the game against Watford looked remarkably similar to some of those abject performances in Mourinho’s last season. Good players who suddenly lacked the attitude, the appetite for the fight, who made casual errors, who did not work anywhere near the necessary level.
The next day, Thibaut Courtois, the goalkeeper, was talking of his heart being in Madrid, where his family live. Understandable for a father. Yet he never seemed to mention it when Chelsea were on top. Once again, in adversity, Chelsea have a lot of players who look like they would rather be anywhere else. And how can that change when it is always the manager who carries the can at Stamford Bridge?