GUNNERS SURVIVE PAIN IN UKRAINE
World Cup winner, two-time Premier League winner, Footballer of the Year, Chelsea’s highest-paid player and their player of the year, but Blues boss Maurizio Sarri says N’Golo Kante is...
Vorskla Poltava v Arsenal Europa League, Group E, Kiev, KO 5.55pm ARSENAL boss Unai Emery and his squad arrived in Kiev last night after a day of chaos where their game came under threat of being called off.
The match against Ukraine’s Vorskla
MAURIZIO SARRI insists N’Golo Kante is not technically good enough to be his holding midfielder in a brutal assessment of the World Cup winner.
Time has not been a healer for Sarri who, four days on, was still fuming about Chelsea’s limp defeat against Tottenham.
And, a week after being handed a bumper five-year, £290,000-a-week deal, Kante was in the firing line when the make-up of Sarri’s midfield was brought up.
The back-to-back title winner has starred as a central midfield anchorman for Leicester, Chelsea and France since moving to England in 2015 and has been widely hailed as the best player of his type.
But Sarri prefers Jorginho (below), who struggled against Spurs, or Cesc Fabregas to occupy the central position in his engine room.
Sarri said: “I want to play a central midfielder who is a very technical player – a Jorginho or Fabregas. I don’t want Kante in this position.
“Kante, in the last match, wanted to solve the match after the first 15 minutes but in the wrong way. He lost his position. He attacked too much the other box.
“This is not one of Kante’s best characteristics, but it was only a reaction to the difficulties. Maybe it’s only a question of time [before he fully understands what
Sarri wants]. When the ball is on the left especially, Kante has to stay very close to Jorginho.”
The Spurs defeat was Chelsea’s first competitive setback this season but the nature of it – “they were able to destroy us in 15 minutes” Sarri said – sparked a detailed post-mortem.
And ahead of tonight’s Europa League clash against PAOK, Sarri said: “First of all I want to see a reaction, but I want to see a reaction in the next Premier League match against Fulham as well.
“I want to see that we have learned our lessons.”