Oluwaseun 🇳🇬
@MobyChe
Chelsea v Bournemouth A Tale of 2 Contrasting Halves, Sounds Familiar, doesn't it🤔 Why Chelsea drew to Bournemouth Tactical Review Thread
Chelsea lined up with their usual 4-2-3-1 shape with Lavia and Noni back in the lineup whilst Bournemouth(BOU) are missing Evanilson and Unal through injury so, Semenyo started at ST yesterday with a midfield 3 of Adams, Christie and Cook
Chelsea's shape on the ball in settled play was a Cucurella, Colwill and Acheampong back 3, Lavia and Caicedo inverting from RB then Enzo in a box-to-box role making it a 3-3-4, Noni, Palmer, Sancho, and Jackson front 4,
So BOU built up in a 2-4 shape, their 2 CBs spread very wide, almost like he's the centre of a back 3 with his CBs and the pivot, Adams and Cook are in front of them, whilst the Fullbacks are very high and wide,, while at times the BOU FBs try to roam with their positioning a bit to free themselves from marking. It was because of BOU's overload against Chelsea's press that they could bypass it into midfield which Chelsea wanted and I'll explain
So Chelsea's pressing set-up was Jackson and Palmer on the 2 BOU Cbs, Sancho and Noni on the 2 FBs when the ball was with the Gk, and when the ball went to the left CB Huljsen, Sancho came inside to cover cook as you see here, whilst Enzo covers Adams, as Chelsea try to box them into one side.
it was Zonal as Palmer & Jackson had to determine who to mark, for Palmer, he either marked Huljsen and cover-shadowed Adams, or Adams, so he had to read the pass well to whoever it was going to, Jackson also took turns to press Zarbanyi or the Gk.
Bournemouth on the other hand, pressed Chelsea virtually M2M and backed themselves to pull it off as i said before the game, with the CBs even coming out to press our 8 like Zarbanyi on Enzo in this pic
But they played into Chelsea's hand as Chelsea had a set-up when the ball got back to Sanchez of a 4(including Sanchez)-3-4/4-2-5, meaning they used Sanchez as an extra man to play out of their press. Which they utilised to open BOU up and create chances https://x.com/mobsilab/status/...
Another way Chelsea opened BOU up was when Chelsea drew BOU unto themselves, fell to their midblock shape, mostly a 5-4-1 with Noni acting as a RB off the ball, at times a 4-4-2 depending on if Palmer joined Jackson to press the CBs, Chelsea set up that way to win the ball and transition on BOU. Chelsea also needed the space to transition as you can get loads of space when you do that as we've seen Liverpool do against them to great success. The aggressiveness of our back 4 with BOU's attackers helped with this
It was effective and a big source of chance creation as it left BOU, 1v1 against our players and you back out better quality players to beat theirs and they did so a lot of the time in the 1st half. Jackson was incredible at beating 2-3 players at a time
It was so effective that BOU couldn't touch Chelsea's box for half of the first half. Up until the 36th min
In the 2nd Half, just 2 minutes in Lavia slipped making a mistake, and Caicedo also made his mistake to concede a penalty out of nowhere which BOU scored.
James came on and he replaced Caicedo at RB inverting into midfield. Caicedo was the DM.
The difference was that we stopped winning our individual battles like we were doing in the first half and BOU started gaining momentum
The manner we conceded the 2nd goal was very disappointing, we were too open, Christie was too free and free to pick out Semenyo who shouldn't have been left 1v1 with Josh
We then started to rush a lot of our play, trying to force our play and become very scrappy which suits BOU more than us. So we could never really get back into the game, pin the back and try to create chances with waves of pressure
It's not only in this game ive noticed it, Chelsea dont seem to know how to settle down and pin teams back when we need to get a goal when were are drawing or behind. we tend to rush things, and force things, and it's part of the development this young squad has to go through. Thank God for Reece's freekick which salvaged the points for us. Maresca set us up to win, we should have scored more in the first half, which was one of our best first halves of the season but in our winning and unbeaten run earlier in the season we would have scored 2, but normal that in a part of the season, you would go through a dry spell in front of goal, and our defending and youthfulness in handling games couldn't help hold the fort till we get ourselves back, it happens.
End of Thread Likes, Reposts and Comments are duly appreciated as always Thank you What do you think went wrong in the 2nd Half?