OUCH! JOSE KICKS BLUES WHERE IT HURTS
United turn up heat on Chelsea
ANTONIO CONTE took the blame for Chelsea’s title wobble and admitted the pressure is now on his side.
Jose Mourinho blew the title race wide open with victory over his former club, who failed to increase their slender four-point lead over Tottenham at the top.
“They deserved to win because they showed more desire than us and more motivation,” said Conte of
IT will still take a classic choke, a collapse of considerable proportion, an implosion of some magnitude.
It will still need Chelsea to bottle it.
It will still require a remarkable run of Tottenham Hotspur wins but it is on, make no mistake.
There are two horses in the title race, one fresh and full of running, the other still clear but sending out distress signals.
Do not allow talk of Jose Mourinho’s tactical triumph to camouflage the mediocrity of this Chelsea performance.
Do not allow Marcus Rashford’s brilliance to deflect from the glaring uncertainty once the defensive combination had to be changed. Do not allow Ander Herrera’s tethering to Eden Hazard divert attention from the startling absence of attacking ideas.
Do not allow the handball launchpad for the first goal to put any sort of different slant on a sloppy, casual, half-paced, guileless display.
It is not as if it came completely out of the deep blue. Chelsea have now lost two of their last four league games and were fortunate against Manchester City for one of those victories in the other two.
Yes, the run-in looks to have given them four home bankers – Southampton, Middlesbrough, Watford and Sunderland – but Crystal Palace’s visit was supposed to be a formality and the two away matches are stern tests.
Everton are on a riotous run at Goodison Park and West Brom is never easy.
At Old Trafford, Antonio Conte had semi-styled himself on Tony Pulis, wearing the cap but forgetting the track part of the suit, but was remarkably subdued.
Maybe he was thrown by the warm-up withdrawal of fullback Marcos Alonso or peeved by the ankle injury that struck
Thibaut Courtois, apparently, according to some, while playing basketball for a commercial shoot.
Ahead of the match, Conte said he was sure Asmir Begovic would “play a great game”.
He did not. His early fall to ground gave Rashford a shoo-in, a scuffed shoo-in as it happened, for the first goal.
Herrera’s handball started the move but David Luiz was alarmingly casual in allowing Rashford in behind.
When Kurt Zouma comes in to the equation, it seems defensive senses are scrambled.
Quite what Gary Cahill was thinking of when pulling Jesse Lingard off the grass as Herrera shaped to send home the second via a Zouma deflection is anybody’s guess.
The worry, though, will be the absence of a single shot on target. Diego Costa’s contribution was as lumbering as it was laughable, as ineffective as it was indisciplined.
Hazard’s main response to Herrera’s attention was to try to draw fouls. He drew a couple but not enough to turn yellow into red.
N’Golo Kante looked anything but a Player of the Year in waiting.
It was an off-day and all teams can have them, but the gross inadequacy of this Chelsea performance is what puts doubt in the minds of those of us who, after the win against City, could see nothing else but a march to the title. This was inexplicably poor. It will still need Chelsea to buckle alarmingly in the home stretch, it will still need Spurs to sustain their surge. But the title race is on.