Chelsea's 6-3 victory away at Everton in the weekend was an absolute thriller for the neutrals, an emotional roller-coaster for the fans, but for the managers, it was somewhat of a nightmare. After the match on Saturday, Jose Mourinho, despite the win, slammed the way his team defended. So how did the best defense in the league last season concede three goals for the first time in the EPL since December of last year? Mirallas Goal The Blues took a very early 2-goal lead in the game inside the opening 3 minutes , and we nearly made it to the dressing rooms with that cushion until Kevin Mirallas popped up with a brilliant header in the last minute of the first half to put the match wide open again. It was an excellent move by the Toffees and it all started with Mirallas himself down the left flank: The Belgian beats Cesc who was trying to show him down the line. Raimres is drawn too easily towards the ball and gets stuck in an ineffective position where he can neither press nor cover a passing lane (hence the big red question mark over his head!). At the far left of the image, you can see Namja Matic making the decision to track Steven Naismith's lateral run. His decision may have been affected by the gap left by Ramires, but, nonetheless, it was the wrong one as the opposite angle clearly shows: Cahill, Ivanovic and Willian clearly have Naismith covered with Branislav able to step up to press him if the ball is indeed played to him without exposing our defense. Matic moving to the right creates a big gap in front of the left side of our defense and leaves Hazard on the far side up against both McGeady and Coleman. Our midfield trio of Matic, Ramires and Fabregas all seem oblivious to the mismatch and gap on the far side. In the white rectangle, you can see Lukaku doing an excellent job of pushing back the defensive line and preventing both of JT and Azpi from coming out to help. You can also see at the top of the picture, Ramires making another bewildering decision of attempting to cut out a pass that he was never going to intercept, leaving us on the back foot even more. Once the ball from Mirallas reaches Barry, we're in serious trouble. We have all of Barry, McGeady and Coleman in acres of space and with only Hazard to try to stop them. Notice how Mirallas, the eventual scorer, storms past Fabregas in the white circle. Next, Barry plays a quick pass into McGeady: Here, Hazard takes a step towards the ball in a failed attempt to block the passing lane towards Coleman. A lot were saying after the match the Eden was to blame for this goal. I wholeheartedly disagree. After he was left alone against 3 players as you can clearly seen in the image before this one, there was no way that he could continue with Coleman's run down the wing. He did the right thing in trying to make the pass from McGeady as difficult as possible. You can also see in the image, Nemanja Matic trying, too late, to make up for his positional mistake by running across to try to press McGeady, but Aiden had found Coleman long before Nemanja had reached him. Here, let me start with Lukaku who makes a very smart diagonal run taking both Terry and Cahill with him; again showing the kind of selfless center forward movement and play that he was criticized a lot of times for not doing enough. Maybe it was the extra motivation of playing against his former team with a point to prove, but I thought Romelu was not nearly as useless in this match as we Chelsea fans tried to make out. Back to the goal, Cahill is forced to track Lukaku's run, but eventually the cross is not aimed at the big Belgian, but at the slightly smaller Belgian. Coleman, one of the best fullbacks in the league going forward, has the time, space and awareness to notice and then perfectly pick out Mirallas' untarcked run into the box. People criticized Cahill for "losing" Mirallas for the header, but that is simply incorrect because he was never tracking him in the first place, he was tracking Lukaku. Cahill eventually tried to go for the ball, but with Miralllas having a big run up on him while Garry himself had to reverse the direction of his run before jumping, it was a header that the English international was never going to win. Instead, the player who should have been marking Kevin is Cesc Fabregas who was with him at the start of the move as we saw above but decided not to track his run into the box. All that said, it was a beautifully worked goal from Everton and some very impressive play by Mirallas who started the move, made a "Lampard-esque" run into the box and capped it off with a quite brilliant header. But it was a goal that could have been prevented from a Chelsea perspective if it weren't for some very unorganized pressing and bad positional decisions from the 3 central midfielders. Something we've seen alarmingly often in the opening 3 matches this season, and though we got away with it against Burnley and Leicester, sides with Everton's quality will eventually make you pay for it. Naismith Goal In what panned out to be a quite crazy second half, Chelsea were first to score and restore the two-goal lead, but almost straight from the kick off Naismith brought the game back to balance after Chelsea defense looked to have fell asleep; so what really happened? First, Garith Barry had the ball in midfield being pressure by Ramires: After he makes the simple pass to McCarthy at the bottom of the picture, who in turn brings McGeady (out of the frame) into the play, Barry makes a run down the right flank; and it's that run that causes all the damage: Notice here Matic at the top of the picture marking the eventual goal scorer, Steven Naismith. Next McGeady will turn and Ramires will come press him: This is when Matic (with the question mark) makes the very odd decision of tracking Barry's run even though Terry and Azpilicueta (in white) clearly have it covered. This move leaves Naismith in the blue circle at the top of the image in acres of space as once again all 3 of our central midfielders (highlighted in red) are attracted to same side of the pitch leaving the far side completely exposed. From there it was all too easy for Everton: McGeady cuts inside, taking advantage of the massive gap left by Matic and beating Ramires a bit too easily (where are those reckless yellow-card worthy tackles when you need them!). At the top of the screenshot you can see Lukaku again playing an invisible but vital role in the goal; this time making a diagonal run coming from the left hand side and dragging Ivanovic inwards with him. Matic is trying to recover by sprinting across to press McGeady, but much like the first goal, he's a bit late. In the red circle, Naismith makes run opposite to that of Lukaku leaving Ivanovic with a very tough decision to make on the timing of when he stops tracking Lukaku's run and starts tracking Naismith's. A decision which the Serb eventually gets wrong: To be fair to Branislav, McGeady got the timing and projectile of his pass to Naismith almost to perfection as did Steven with his run. You could possibly argue that Ivanovic could have stopped tracking Lukaku a fraction of a second earlier and took a step to his right, but that would just be harsh nit picking. Ivanovic was put in a very difficult situation that even the top CBs can get wrong half of the time. I wouldn't call that a mistake and it's not what caused the goal. The goal was a result of Nemanja Matic making a very bizarre decision and leaving a very big gap in the middle. Again, our central midfielders seem to be the main culprits for us conceding. And, for me, this comes as no surprise. The pressing of our 3 central midfielders so far this season has often lacked coordination and it seems like all three are still adjusting to their new roles which is causing them to make some positional mistakes. It is still way too early to be passing any kind of judgement on the three in the middle of Jose's 4-3-3 for this season, but their pressing is definitely something we need to be working on in training. Eto'o Goal Among the 3 goals conceded at Goodison, Jose stated that he was most frustrated at the third saying that he has trained the team for a whole hour and a half on Wednesday on lateral FKs so it's not acceptable that we concede from one a couple of days later. It could be that, or it could be the fact that it was Eto'o who scored the goal that upset the special one: It all started with Lukaku winning a FK (a very very soft FK I might add) and Baines stepping up to whip it into the box: You might say that the defensive line is a bit too high for a FK that close, but other than that small detail, we don't seem in any immediate danger in that image. Everyone is standing well and organized. At the front of the line, we have Costa then Iva then JT and in between them are Naismith and Eto'o who is about to score. Now, I don't know if Costa was supposed to be marking Naismith and Iva Eto'o or if Costa is just there to head the ball away which would mean that Iva is actually marking Naismith and JT marking Eto'o. Whatever it was, there seemed to be a misunderstanding or lack of communication that would leave both Naismith and Eto'o poorly marked: When Baines runs up to the FK, Costa stands still, Ivanovic (red) continues his run with Naismith while Terry (blue) stays with Jaagielka (unseen here between JT and Cahill) leaving Eto'o unmarked. When Ivanovic realizes this, he stops his runs and attempts to run back towards Eto'o: Eto'o gets his head to the ball first and Ivanovic is late which leaves both Eto'o and Naismith practically unmarked. But even from this picture, you'd expect a header from 15 yards out to be stopped by the keeper who looks in a good position to make a save, right? Wrong, because Courtois is caught completely wrong footed by the header. Thibaut's starting position is decent as we can see above. He is a keeper who will always look to anticipate and intervene so he will always take 'aggressive' positions. That might sometimes cost him, but a lot of the times it will end the danger before there is any. I am okay with that. But it is this eagerness to anticipate that costs him in this case: Here, just as the ball is about to reach Eto'o, Thibaut takes a big step to his left probably anticipating a flick from Eto'o to Lukaku and Jaagielka on that side, leaving the right side of his goal exposed to Samuel's well placed header. So, it was some poor marking and communication by the defenders and a misread situation by the keeper that caused the third goal. I think Jose and the team might need to put in a few more hours on the training ground working on these FKs... In conclusion, while Chelsea looks a completely different team going forward so far this season with the changes made in the summer, we are also letting in goals that we did not allow last season. A big part of that, imo, is due to the new roles in central midfield, especially in the pressing that has at times lacked organization and coordination leaving gaps in the defensive system that were not there last season. Luckily, it's still very early days and we have plenty of time to fix all of the issues on the training ground, so no need to hit the panic button just yet.
