In recent weeks, the first bullet point of the opposition scouting report on Chelsea has become increasingly clear: stop their right flank and you have a great chance to beat them.
Wolves had paid a brutal price for giving Cole Palmer and Noni Madueke space to combine on that side in the second half of last month’s 6-2 defeat at Molineux.
Bournemouth were determined not to make the same mistake — Lewis Cook man-marked Palmer in the right half-space while Milos Kerkez harassed Madueke from behind near the touchline. Even if one of Chelsea’s two most dangerous attackers received a forward pass with a successful first touch, no second touch went without a foul.
Although it was not particularly subtle, it was highly effective. Madueke, scorer of four goals in his last six appearances for club and country, was reduced to gesturing in frustration when substituted in the 62nd minute at the Vitality Stadium. Palmer endured his quietest stretch on the pitch since his peripheral first half against Manchester City at Stamford Bridge on the opening weekend.
Yet despite successfully shutting down the area of the pitch that contained Chelsea’s only reliable path to chance creation, Bournemouth lost. Their unlikely defeat was a tale of Sanchez and Sancho, and the way it played out could be hugely significant to the development of Enzo Maresca’s team.
Robert Sanchez enjoyed the biggest night of his Chelsea career in goal, capping a string of solid saves with a spectacular dive to his left to keep out Evanilson’s first-half penalty kick and bail out Wesley Fofana for a horrendously botched backpass.
Stirred by that reprieve, the half-time introduction of Jadon Sancho truly transformed the game and offered a tantalising glimpse into how he could change Chelsea for the better.
A huge save from Sanchez. 🧤#CFC | #BOUCHE pic.twitter.com/NXjrCHuqI4
— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) September 14, 2024
Over the last six seasons, Chelsea’s attack has changed as much in style as it has in personnel, from a unit dominated by a master creator operating from the left (Eden Hazard) to one primarily deployed on the right (Palmer). Between those two polar extremes came a steady flow of influence from left to right under Thomas Tuchel, primarily driven by the understandable desire to maximise the rare attacking talents of Reece James as a rampaging wing-back.
The graphic below shows how the distribution of Chelsea’s final-third entries in the Premier League has changed, with nearly a third of their attacks coming down the left flank six years ago but under a quarter last season.
Any team’s attacking patterns will invariably skew towards the location of their best players, but a dramatic imbalance is rarely healthy. Hazard’s brilliance in 2018-19 was even more astonishing because Chelsea’s opponents frequently loaded their defensive resources towards him, away from the opposite flank where Cesar Azpilicueta and Willian offered more tactical ballast than creative balance.
It was a similar story last season when Palmer frequently tormented teams from the right but Mauricio Pochettino struggled to get any consistent attacking production out of his left side. On that flank, Raheem Sterling did not deliver goals and assists at the level of a squad’s highest earner and Mykhailo Mudryk frequently looked unprepared to make a positive impact on Premier League games.
Pedro Neto’s arrival from Wolves for £51.4million ($67m) last month was Chelsea’s first attempt to address this specific need in the transfer market but the Portuguese left-footer looks a little too predictable in his movements on the left flank. In the first half at the Vitality Stadium, he even struggled to get consistent touches amid a swarming Bournemouth press.
His toils were amplified by Maresca’s surprising deployment of full-back Marc Cucurella as a receiver in the left half-space when Chelsea were in possession. Tracked dutifully by his marker Antoine Semenyo, Cucurella offered little more than an unusual distraction in the opening 45 minutes, giving the entire left side of the team the look of a post-modern tactical experiment.
It took Sancho three minutes on the pitch to make sense of it all, receiving the ball in space on the left and playing a quick, incisive pass to pick out Cucurella’s underlapping run into a crossing position; the resulting delivery came agonisingly close to giving Madueke a tap-in.
From that moment, he oozed confidence and class, immediately sure of his place in Maresca’s system and his ability to find his new team-mates in front of the travelling Chelsea fans, who needed no second invitation to sing his name. Shortly before the hour mark, he edged infield from the left, freezing two Bournemouth defenders with a tight dribble and manufacturing a window through which he flicked a pass right to an unmarked Jackson, who curled over.
Nkunku’s winner! 🎈#CFC | #BOUCHE pic.twitter.com/e2SguCP84p
— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) September 14, 2024
That proved a prelude to the sequence that resulted in Chelsea’s winner: Sancho angling his body infield to survey his options, jinking and shifting to create separation from his defender, then picking the perfect time to find Christopher Nkunku with the momentum and weight of pass that enabled the Frenchman to swivel and wriggle between three Bournemouth defenders and beat Mark Travers with a quick shot, as clever as it was clinical.
Chelsea fans have grown accustomed to seeing Palmer nonchalantly dissect Premier League defences with similar passes from the right side over the past year. Now, in Sancho, they have a winger with the vision, spatial awareness and ball mastery to do the same from the left, which should make life much harder on opponents with finite defensive tools to stifle Maresca’s attack.
“I said when we brought in Jadon that the reason why is because we were looking for another winger like Noni,” Maresca said after the Bournemouth win. “Noni is doing that on the right side, winning one-v-one, creating chances, scoring goals and we were looking for the same on our left side with Jadon.”
The key for Chelsea’s new attacking balance is ensuring they get this version of Sancho consistently — the Borussia Dortmund vintage rather than the tainted Manchester United variety. If they do, supporters will be singing his name weekly and Maresca’s front line will soon be the spectacular sum of its hugely talented individual parts.
(Top photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
