The Palmer paradox: Chelsea head to Manchester City with symbol of hope
Three little birds you say? Three of them, eh? Todd likes birds. Todd likes gamechangers. How much for the birds? Talk to their people. Double it. Just get me the birds, Costanza.
It has become a reflex response to dredge out every last note of potential comedy from the current Chelsea team building model; and to do so, with all due respect to the many other shades of US sporting tycoon-dom, in the voice of Larry David pretending to be George Steinbrenner in Seinfield.
The reality is a little different these days. That initial splurge of financial incontinence has run its course. Todd Boehly has long since retreated from daily frontline business. But it was still tempting to imagine the reaction of Chelsea’s rapaciously acquisitive executive to the abrupt shift of energies at Selhurst Park on Monday night.
With Chelsea 1-0 down at halftime and the restart delayed by a shemozzle with the referee’s microphone, the away support began to sing along, with an obvious note of irony, to the endlessly upbeat chorus of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds as it played over the PA, sticking with it as Conor Gallagher equalised almost immediately, then returning to that same refrain en route to a late-breaking 3-1 win. Sign them up. Sign them all up. Sign all the birds.
Chelsea’s season remains a flighty, brittle thing, with a 13-point gap to fourth place and some invertebrate performances in recent weeks. But as Mauricio Pochettino prepares his squad for Saturday’s trip to Manchester City, there is at least some cheer to be taken from a second straight away victory, a nice moment in the Croydon drizzle, and perhaps even the vaguest outline of what a working version of an actual team might look like beneath the current collection of squad numbers.
The shift after the break was instant, with the midfield triangle of Caicedo-Fernández-Gallagher wresting control of the ball, and Cole Palmer providing a familiar note of cold precision to help make both of Chelsea’s late goals.
Palmer will provide an obvious narrative peg in the buildup to Saturday’s game, which marks a first professional return to the club he joined at the age of eight. There will be a temptation to wonder whether City made a mistake in selling him given his fine form, which includes six goals and four assists in 10 games since Christmas Day.
In fact this feels like a rare no-fault divorce, a transfer that benefits everyone involved. City, who already had the strongest attack in Europe, get to bank £40m of FFP fuel. Palmer has been proven right: he really did just need to play. Chelsea, meanwhile, have their most convincing creative addition since Cesc Fàbregas, and a footballer who also provides a very useful parable of exactly why the talent hoarding model is so obviously flawed.
This is the paradox of Palmer. Even his success feels like a kind of cosmic joke at Chelsea’s expense, punchline to that half a billion pounds of random overspend. He was the last of Chelsea’s gold-rush signings, a deadline day £42m fluttered off in the direction of yet another twentysomething inside forward. At the time it felt like a bit of a head scratcher. Why now, after buying six other promising young attackers, would you work so hard to sigh this one too?
Yet Palmer is, to date, the only one of those signings that has actually worked. At the end of the money rainbow, having already stapled your future to a flashmob of players on seven- and eight-year contracts, having shredded any coherent notion of team building, here’s the good and timely signing you were looking for all that time.
Such is the capricious nature of youthful talent, the impossibility of gaming the market, of really knowing whether, say, Mykhaylo Mudryk is actually going to be any good; not least with the added self-disruption of chucking them all together in one pot. It turns out this is what you get for £1bn. One unarguably functioning young player, the last one in through the doors when all the fish have already been sold.
In another blow for more traditional forms of squad building, it helped that Joe Shields, former head of City’s academy recruitment, had a genuine closeup sniff test knowledge of Palmer’s capacities. It may have also helped that Palmer has been able to find his Premier League feet somewhere less orderly than City’s meticulously grooved machine. One advantage of Chelsea’s less functional state is that a young player with Palmer’s unusual, occasionally nonconformist’s set of skills has the space to make mistakes, to eat up minutes, to work out how to do all this on his own time.
There is a fair chance City’s powerful run of form (11 straight wins, six goals conceded) means Palmer will get to spend Saturday evening chasing the ball on the fringes. For now his goal and assist tally seems like evidence of an even greater impact given those interventions have often arrived out of a sense of tactical vagueness, rather than in a team where the task is basically to follow the pattern and provide the final gloss.
Palmer is an unusual creative player generally, gangly but agile, expert in finding the small spaces between the equally small spaces, able to control and manoeuvre the ball in unorthodox ways. He seems to have the classic chess planner brain, scanning three moves ahead, making the perfectly weighted passes that matter. These are rare qualities in a 21-year-old, but none as rare as Palmer’s striking air of calm.
Gareth Southgate used him in both of England’s November internationals, but he remains a long shot for a spot at the Euros, if only because of things such as hierarchy and entrenched positions. International football involves a degree of making the game up on the hoof, of remaining completely unfazed by the moment. Palmer, you feel, wouldn’t ever need to be told he’s good enough to be out there.
For now a meeting of these two teams provides another opportunity to compare City’s steady upward curve against Chelsea’s spikes of chaos. It is two and half years since they met in Porto to contest the Champions League final, the last significant date for Roman Abramovich’s version of Chelsea, Billionaire Disruptors Mk1.
Only three members of Chelsea’s victorious 23-man squad remain at the club, Reece James, Thiago Silva and Ben Chilwell. City still have seven of their starting XI, same manager, same ownership, same trajectory. For Chelsea, hope lies now in the hands of the last man through the door, the paradox signing who demonstrates, in the end, the flaws not the merits of team building by extravagant numbers.