Analyzing The 3 Goals Conceded At Goodison

[CHOULO19 24,332]

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.

[Jase 43,479]

That's rather late!

[MrBlueGuy 1,552]

As good as your analysis is, it is probably pointless imo. One of those game that happen once/twice per season, just never gonna happen again. Obviously if we played Bayern we would have parked it so hard the 1st 2 goals wouldn't have happened but we were 2 goals in front so concentration level dropped. I am sure Jose will tell the team that and analyses like you, but the main point he makes is that we didn't do much wrong and it was a freak of a game.

For example the Naysmith goal, we just scored so we were in relax mode, no one expected Everton to go all out attack straight away as they did from kick off. The Eto'o goal again probably nothing could have been done about, it was a good technique, guiding it to the corner and Courtois probably didn't expect it. Next time we play Swansea I believe these things won't happen, we will go back to be like against Leicester.

[CHOULO19 24,332]

That's rather late!

I'll promote it to the main site tomorrow. I started wtiring a bit lat but I couldn't stop writing half way through it because all the pics would take A LOT to reupload and post.

And I think I 'over-analyzed' a bit!

[CHOULO19 24,332]

As good as your analysis is, it is probably pointless imo. One of those game that happen once/twice per season, just never gonna happen again. Obviously if we played Bayern we would have parked it so hard the 1st 2 goals wouldn't have happened but we were 2 goals in front so concentration level dropped. I am sure Jose will tell the team that and analyses like you, but the main point he makes is that we didn't do much wrong and it was a freak of a game.

For example the Naysmith goal, we just scored so we were in relax mode, no one expected Everton to go all out attack straight away as they did from kick off. The Eto'o goal again probably nothing could have been done about, it was a good technique, guiding it to the corner and Courtois probably didn't expect it. Next time we play Swansea I believe these things won't happen, we will go back to be like against Leicester.

Disagree about the goals being "un-analyzable". I think the first two goals both came from mistakes we've done a lot in the opening 3 games. We got let off the hook against Burnley and Leicester but Everton have the quality to punish us as will many decent sides in the EPL and UCL.

Read the article to see what we could have done about the second and third goal

[Jase 43,479]

As good as your analysis is, it is probably pointless imo. One of those game that happen once/twice per season, just never gonna happen again. Obviously if we played Bayern we would have parked it so hard the 1st 2 goals wouldn't have happened but we were 2 goals in front so concentration level dropped. I am sure Jose will tell the team that and analyses like you, but the main point he makes is that we didn't do much wrong and it was a freak of a game.

For example the Naysmith goal, we just scored so we were in relax mode, no one expected Everton to go all out attack straight away as they did from kick off. The Eto'o goal again probably nothing could have been done about, it was a good technique, guiding it to the corner and Courtois probably didn't expect it. Next time we play Swansea I believe these things won't happen, we will go back to be like against Leicester.

Mourinho would disagree with that. He said after the game he can point out defensive mistakes for all the three goals (plus more for the moments that we didn't concede from). Yes, some of them were good goals from Everton but they could have been prevented with better organization and concentration in the defensive duties. It's just too easy for people to say we can't do anything for such goals when we can.

[Muzchap 8,966]

Great bit of work there Choulo

The problem as I saw it was the gap between defence and the midfield trio - too much space behind which opened up runners and then led to problems - I think we missed Oscar in that position.

Fully expect it to be fixed for the next game(s) though

[CHOULO19 24,332]

Great bit of work there Choulo

The problem as I saw it was the gap between defence and the midfield trio - too much space behind which opened up runners and then led to problems - I think we missed Oscar in that position.

Fully expect it to be fixed for the next game(s) though

Thanks.

Yes, that's exactly right. The 3 in the middle got attracted to the same side quite a lot of times, leaving massive gaps in the middle and on the other side. We even had this issue in the first two matches, but obviously Evertons quality made it more apparent.

[hjperdeath 2,226]

I've been replaced.
BAN ME YOU %$@!# .

[nyikolajevics 2,578]

Wow... Very nice article, congrats.

[CHOULO19 24,332]

I've been replaced.

BAN ME YOU %$@!# .

Wow... Very nice article, congrats.

Cheers

[Special Juan 27,429]

Ivanovic body position is all wrong for the Eto'o header which is poor.

[CHOULO19 24,332]

Ivanovic body position is all wrong for the Eto'o header which is poor.

That's because he had to reverse his run after starting to run with Naismith. Serious lack of communication between him, Costa and JT in that goal.

[The only place to be 11,313]

Great bit of work there Choulo

The problem as I saw it was the gap between defence and the midfield trio - too much space behind which opened up runners and then led to problems - I think we missed Oscar in that position.

Fully expect it to be fixed for the next game(s) though

I quite agree. Whilst Fabregas isn't exactly busting a gut to track Mirallas's run for the first you have to ask what exactly Ramires is doing? Doesn't apply pressure to anyone on the ball, saunters back into the box and is completely unaware of anyone making a run from deep.

When people talk about his strengths being his engine and his defensive capabilities, you really have to wonder what he's doing.

The Naismith goal is simply an example of what happens when a team just attacks with pace. Three players get sucked into tracking Barry's run leaving gaps in midfield for McGeady to run into. Ramires just dangles a leg at him before ushering him through, Matic can't get back across, Lukaku makes a good run which suckers in Ivanovic and Willian has no chance of getting back. Mistakes combined with crisp movement and passing that you have to give Everton some credit for.

Third match of the season, a new midfield trio and a freakish match mean it's really not something that needs overanalyzing or worrying about too much.

[The only place to be 11,313]

The third goal is just one of those things. The reason that Eto'o is softly marked 16 yards out from the goal it because he's 16 yards out for the goal. If you want to try and head a ball back across the goal against a keeper of Courtois's ability then go for it, because unless it's a perfect header then it's not that dangerous.

Eto'o's header was perfect though. Costa is there to deal with anything short and Baines clips it about a metre away from him but the finish is absolutely world-class. Sometimes you just have to applaud excellent execution like that. Could JT have been tighter? Yeah, probably. But 99 times out of 100 that header is 6 inches closer to Courtois and he deals with it or it's 10 inches further to the right and it goes wide.

[CHOULO19 24,332]

The third goal is just one of those things. The reason that Eto'o is softly marked 16 yards out from the goal it because he's 16 yards out for the goal. If you want to try and head a ball back across the goal against a keeper of Courtois's ability then go for it, because unless it's a perfect header then it's not that dangerous.

Eto'o's header was perfect though. Costa is there to deal with anything short and Baines clips it about a metre away from him but the finish is absolutely world-class. Sometimes you just have to applaud excellent execution like that. Could JT have been tighter? Yeah, probably. But 99 times out of 100 that header is 6 inches closer to Courtois and he deals with it or it's 10 inches further to the right and it goes wide.

Don't think Eto'o header was "perfect". I mean it was beautifully placed, but it barely had any power behind it. The step to the right (his left) that Courtois makes just as Eto'o is about to head the ball makes all the difference in the end. Had he stayed in his starting position he would have save that fairly comfortably.

[LAB 1,030]

The third goal is just one of those things. The reason that Eto'o is softly marked 16 yards out from the goal it because he's 16 yards out for the goal. If you want to try and head a ball back across the goal against a keeper of Courtois's ability then go for it, because unless it's a perfect header then it's not that dangerous.

Eto'o's header was perfect though. Costa is there to deal with anything short and Baines clips it about a metre away from him but the finish is absolutely world-class. Sometimes you just have to applaud excellent execution like that. Could JT have been tighter? Yeah, probably. But 99 times out of 100 that header is 6 inches closer to Courtois and he deals with it or it's 10 inches further to the right and it goes wide.

Agreed. While the first two goals came from exploiting vast space we left open in front of our defence, the Eto'o header was sensational, unstoppable. He also made some nice attempts to assist Lukaku later in the game. He was overall very good sub for Everton.

[Barbara 15,149]

The third goal is just one of those things. The reason that Eto'o is softly marked 16 yards out from the goal it because he's 16 yards out for the goal. If you want to try and head a ball back across the goal against a keeper of Courtois's ability then go for it, because unless it's a perfect header then it's not that dangerous.

Eto'o's header was perfect though. Costa is there to deal with anything short and Baines clips it about a metre away from him but the finish is absolutely world-class. Sometimes you just have to applaud excellent execution like that. Could JT have been tighter? Yeah, probably. But 99 times out of 100 that header is 6 inches closer to Courtois and he deals with it or it's 10 inches further to the right and it goes wide.

This I agree with (the previous post too). The third goal is the one I think it's more about how good movement and finish Eto'o did than our defense being sloppy. What happens with every single player when a set-piece is taken? They start moving forward, the defenders because they want to anticipate the attackers and the attackers because they want to reach the ball. Eto'o's decision of staying still and maybe even taking a half step back (can't remember) is brilliant and the header execution is perfect. That's the kind of goal you'll concede because the striker made his job well. Sometimes the striker makes his job well and you can still prevent a goal, sometimes you just can't and that's one of those cases imo - regardless if it came from a set-piece or not.

I also agree about the first goal. As much as one can blame Cesc for not tracking Mirallas, Ramires is between him and Mirallas - marking or pressing no one, moving nowhere... So it's only normal once an opponent enters your teammates 'marking zone' you leave it for him to do the marking and go find someone else. The moment Mirallas got passed Cesc, he entered the zone of the pitch where Ramires was supposed to cover, but the fact that Ramires acts and moves like a headless chicken effectively marking, pressing no one, leads Cesc to try to regain ground - but he was nearly the half line of the pitch, and he isn't that fast, so of course he won't reach Mirallas in time. In the meanwhile Ramires continues to be badly positioned...

In this frame you can see he can make positioning decisions as bad as he can make passing decisions.

What on earth is he planning to do? He should have stopped running and positioned himself at the edge of the box where he just needs to know more players are coming to from behind. Every time a team attack there are players coming from behind. You may need to take a quick glance behind you to know where you should go... instead he decides not to think, to keep running and join another 3-4 players that are already closing in Lukaku. That's the same mistake Burnley made in that Schurrle's goal. No one tracked Fabregas coming from behind, none of their players around the box decided to hold position instead of crowding the box and Fabregas was left with time and space to make that brilliant pass to Schurrle's goal (he didn't even use the time, as his pass was immediate). Ramires should know and do better. His space awareness was terrible in this goal - although Cesc and Matic weren't that well positioned either, but at least they were at different moments, marking someone. Ramires marked/tracked no one since the ball was in the midfield.

Also I'm only commentating on a goal, I'm not crucifying anyone...