It was fun while it lasted
Interim head coach Calum McFarlane was hoping to build on Sunday’s rousing 1-1 draw at the Etihad and hand the team off to new full-time head coach Liam Rosenior (who was in attendance last night) with good momentum, but yet another red card consigned the Blues to yet another poor result, losing 2-1 at Craven Cottage. It was Chelsea’s league-leading fifth (5th!) red card of the season. Everton are the only other team to have more than two, after they had two players sent off late on yesterday.
With Chelsea also high up on the yellow cards list (fourth most in the league), the team’s discipline (or lack thereof) has been drawn into sharp focus of late. This is a rather familiar concern with this (still) young team, though for McFarlane, Marc Cucurella’s red card was more of a footballing incident than one stemming from poor discipline. (The multitude of yellows that followed were a different story.)
Of course, discipline can also be about focus and mental sharpness, and Cucu’s red was certainly not the first boneheaded mistake to doom us to defeat in recent times.
“There’s been a lot made of the red cards this season. I don’t think this red card is ill-disciplined. This is football. This happens in football. You get caught one-v-one and Marc is one of the best defenders in the world. So, he would defend that situation nine times out of 10. Harry Wilson’s clever and he shows quality as well. He’s a very good player.
“So, we got caught from a football and structural standpoint. So, that red card is not a lack of ill-discipline. The three yellow cards directly after is something we’ll have to look at, but I would argue that we don’t want that to happen, obviously.
I would then argue that they showed discipline to not get another yellow card in a tough game with 10 men. So, you can look at it either way. So, it’s definitely something we have to look at. I’m not shying away from that. But that red card wasn’t down to ill-discipline.“
McFarlane tried his best to still get something out of this game, but Fulham would retake the lead after Liam Delap’s equalizer, meaning that we now have just eight points from our last nine games. That’s relegation form for a team aiming for trophies returns-on-investments.
“[The red card] changes your plans in and out of possession and what you want to do. [In] the first 20 minutes, we were really aggressive on the press, really embracing man-for-man presses, man-for-man structures. We nicked it three or four times in the first 20 minutes. That changes. You can’t really press like that with 10 men. We had to be a little bit more compact, defend, fight, defend our box and wait for moments.
“I thought we did that really well. I thought we had a lot of moments in the second half where we scored the goal, where we could have scored the goal. I thought we defended our box really well, other than, to be fair, a really high-level bit of quality from Harry Wilson to win the game. That was the message at half-time. We’re going to have to fight. We’re going to have to dig in. The game plan is different, but let’s embrace that.
“[…] These guys want to win so much. They’re competitors. […] These lads are great lads, great fighters, great competitors. They will learn from [this] and we get better.”
-Calum McFarlane; source: Football.London
Well, over to you, Liam Rosenior.
Category: General Sports
