London is Blue Dispatch #072

It is a little over five years since a stony-faced teen jogged onto the Stamford Bridge turf at half-time, his boyhood club in disarray – 3-1 down at the break against Ajax in a vital Champions League tie. His captain, long-standing club stalwart Cesar Azpilicueta, moved over to the left wing to vacate the right flank for the youngster. In the midst of all the angst, no one realized they had witnessed a changing of the guard – one iconic right-back making way for another, present captain ushering in a future one.

Half an hour later, that symbolic gesture was etched in stone as the ball ricocheted off the Ajax crossbar from a Zouma header and fell to Reece James. The sweet sound of the volley was bettered only by Stamford Bridge erupting – the metal grates clanging in frenzied euphoria to greet the triumphant knee-slide from their new cult hero.

Those five years since have yielded equal parts ecstasy and equal parts despair for Reece. At 23, he became a UEFA Champions League and UEFA Super Cup winner, but both his winner’s medals were stolen when he was away on Champions League duty against Zenit. He has started 120 games since scoring the goal that sealed an improbable point. Last night’s Heidenheim game made it 100 games missed due to injury in four-and-a-quarter seasons.

That latest setback, another hamstring injury, is expected to put him out until late December. With Chelsea now seemingly in a top 3 race and sitting atop the UEFA Conference League table, more and more voices are moving away from whispered denial, anger, bargaining (just let him be fit for 20 games a season!) to more vocal acceptance that absence no longer makes the heart grow fonder.

The Fallen and Forgotten

Take away fan sentiment for a moment and teleport yourself to Chelsea’s zenith this past decade. The Thomas Tuchel juggernaut, the team that no one wants to play against, kept winning until they found themselves in five competitions that took them from London to Abu Dhabi, via St. Petersburg. Sprawling distances, relentless games led to an eerily similar pattern in the career trajectory of three of Chelsea’s heroes in the UCL and Super Cup winning run.

Ben Chilwell, famously one of the PL’s freak athletes at Leicester and regularly topping the sprint charts, went from playing 1,343 minutes for Leicester in 16/17, to 2,504 the next season and in his last season for Leicester played 2,943. In his first for Chelsea he hit a career-high 3,352 minutes. His minutes dropped to 843 in 2021/22, then 1,964 in 22/23 and 1,172 last season. This season he has featured for 45, with Maresca publicly stating the England international is no longer in the club’s plans.

Mason Mount went from 2,526 at Vitesse, 3,590 at Derby, to 3,734 in his first Chelsea season. He then hit a career-high of 4,230 minutes. Like Chilwell, at the peak is where the decline kicked in – 3,734 next season to 2,184, and finally just 784 for United last season. Mount missed two games due to injuries in his first two full seasons for the Blues. That number quadrupled to 4 in the 21/22 season, went to 13 the next season. At United last season, he missed 27.

Chilwell, another Champions League winning fullback, is now viewed by a majority of the fanbase as surplus to requirement. With Cucurella’s magnificent turnaround, Maresca has preferred playing Gusto on his weaker side rather than start Chilwell, despite him being a great tactical fit in the more-attacking iterations of his setup. Mount’s perception flipped at an equally alarming pace. Neither player has recovered their peak athleticism or availability since.

Injuries and Impact

The cruel physical and grueling psychological toll of repeated injury lay-offs to elite athletes like the three mentioned above cannot be understated. In a Guardian interview with Callum Wilson a few years ago, the Bournemouth striker details the harrowing ordeals of sustaining ACL injuries to both his knees in the space of 16 months. He also describes seeing his son wearing the kit of the striker Bournemouth signed to replace him. It is hard to tell which incident hurt him more.

Reece’s trauma remains largely private, but there are unmistakable signs that it has worn him down too. In May last year, he shared a page from his journal elucidating on the process of coping through his setbacks – describing them as “super tough” and “draining,” turning to boxing and tennis as an escape. It was a rare, intimate glimpse into the inner sanctum of a world-class footballer’s well-being.

In the first 9,681 minutes of his senior career, Reece accumulated only 12 yellows and no reds – a card roughly every 806 minutes. In his next 5,279 minutes, his yellows soared to 16, along with 3 reds. That’s a card every 278 minutes, a drastic increase. Two of those reds came in just 479 minutes of football last season, one of them a vicious kick out at João Pedro, completely out of character for a player rarely unfazed, rarely prone to emotional dissonance.

And yet, through the worst of his personal predicament, he appeared for only his 2^nd league start after an injury setback last year against City to shut down the electric Jeremy Doku, supplying the assist for Raheem Sterling’s goal for a 2-1 lead. He returned after another layoff against Liverpool this season, and days later, dropped a man-of-the-match performance against Newcastle to seal a crucial three points. This is a fullback who has shut down both Vinicius Jr. and Rafael Leão, multiple times, in their prime. He is only 24. He has played central midfield, left back, right back and centerback – just like the captain who preceded him, who moved to the left flank against Ajax to welcome him, then went on to score from defense to spark off the historic comeback. Fullbacks like them aren’t produced, they are received – as a blessing, as a gift.

The worry, then, is not that the Chelsea fanbase is losing faith in Reece James; he has been counted out before and fought back. The worry is Reece losing faith in himself, of a mind abandoning hope in a body that fails to match its exceptional resilience and collapses repeatedly under the burden of expectations.

To the oft whispered question of – is it time to look beyond Reece? There is no wrong answer. But consider this: he is the ultimate aspiration for a club and its academy – a manifestation of every boy’s dream that he can, after all, walk out leading his club, wearing its hallowed armband. Yes, to keep him on an eye-watering wage & long-term deal while he continues to battle injury-hell, the club loses something. But to sell the boy who broke mind and body to help his home lift the holy chalice, who is a bridge and lighthouse between the Chelsea of old and the new Chelsea, one part of two siblings who turn two good sides to great – the club loses something money simply cannot replace.