London is Blue Dispatch #034

For large spells of the game, the Chelsea XI looked like they didn’t want to be there. Still grappling with a grief-induced hangover, brains wrapped in a blanket of fog, they strolled about with the enthusiasm of a cool-down session at Cobham. Ten minutes in, Stamford Bridge seemed like it was in mourning hours before a death, the eerie disquiet of indifference far more damning that the boos that have reverberated through a difficult campaign.

And yet Chelsea did what they often do, out of accident more than purpose, like a dormant super-ability they cannot summon at will. After 15 minutes of insipid indifference, the first signs of static crackled into life. Mudryk, starting after a report earlier today claimed he tearfully asked Arsenal to prevent his Chelsea move from materializing, began to play like there was a point to prove. A delightful sequence with three incisive actions in the space of a minute was followed by smartly popping up in the unfamiliar right side and slotting in to put the Blues ahead.

Almost all of the second half played out like a director’s cut of the extra time performance against Liverpool in the final. Heavy legs began to falter. Mudryk returned to his default setting of running into cul-de-sacs and hasty touches. Sterling, on his heels multiple times after being dispossessed, summed up his fortunes by making a good run for Nico Jackson’s throughball, which somehow snuck by to him, but the Englishman was too busy looking skywards. That sequence would lead to Leeds’ equalizer, poetic justice. 61% of possession in the first half became 41% in the second. For a side assembled with a spanking 200m investment in two on-ball magicians, it was damning to see that the prop central to their performance was nowhere to be seen.  

In the end, it took another late winner from the top drawer to help seal a largely unconvincing win. Although the relief is palpable and much welcome, the hard-hitting questions keep flying at the windshield at breakneck pace. For Pochettino, this game felt more like an independently organized rescue rather than a team-effort coordinated by him. Faith in him and his staff now hangs by its last slivers. Senior players, signed to lead by example and by performance, have failed to string two good performances together. While it was Liverpool’s academy scholars that heaped humiliation last game, it was 20-year-old Mateo Joseph who scored twice, a karmic reminder of a new transfer policy that has come to commodify a club’s essence, the roots that sustain and nurture it. It was, after all, the academy boy who could and should have won the Carabao Cup final with his chances, and despite the fatigue and the disappointment, who rose to the occasion for the second time this month. He is yet to be offered a new contract by the hierarchy despite being one of the best players in the side since the start of the season.

This game, however, doesn’t tell us anything we do not already know – everyone’s suffering. Poch has started to resemble Potter in his exchanges with the press, in his decisions on the pitch. Most of this side cannot sustain their quality for more than 60 minutes. The result, the process, it still exudes the stench of scepticism, but a win over Leeds (their first lost in two months) to make it to the FA Cup quarterfinals should hopefully smell sweeter come the morning.