Chelsea’s collection of wonderkids yet to click but it’s fun to watch the chaos
New toys! Never mind the score. Never mind the brittleness in a Chelsea performance that was fun and frisky, but felt at times like devouring a series of starter plates; and never mind that West Ham might easily have won but for the intervention of VAR in the dying moments.
Just check out the names. What a Chelsea starting XI this was. Here they come, the project boys, the Todd Academy, seven players under 24, five new signings and a side that carried its own sense of gameshow conveyor belt excitement. A World Cup winner. A 21-year-old French defensive prodigy.
A frowning Ukrainian super-kid. A caravan. A holiday. A nice bearded man hoping for the best.
It is unrealistic to expect Chelsea’s swirl of starry players, a model that is unprecedented in English football, to click into a functioning shape straight away. This thing has no outline and no obvious end point. But it was fascinating to watch it fret and dazzle and search for its own edges.
For a while, Chelsea looked like running away with the game before being pegged back by West Ham’s tenacious qualities. A 1-1 draw could just as easily have been a 4-1 win or a 2-1 defeat. Welcome to the new world. You will, for the time being, need a notebook and, ideally, access to a few good scouting sites.
The London Stadium was a boisterous place at kick-off, gripped also with a note of curiosity. Chelsea have eight players out injured. Happily, they also have an abundance in reserve, able to send fresh waves into the meat grinder no matter what their losses, like the battle of Stalingrad fought by a battalion of jinky 21-year-old insideforwards.
For half an hour this new-look team, decked out in their used teabag beige away shirts, played football from their own crisp, new-build footballing universe. With less than a minute gone João Félix and Mykhaylo Mudryk combined 40 yards from goal, romping forward side by side, a sudden flare of boyishly handsome energy that almost burst the defensive line.
There was another lovely moment as Reece James played a precision forward pass for Félix to run on to