Sarri But Not Sarri Thread

[manpe 10,861]

9 hours ago, quickpassnmove said:

Oh... and are we in transition? FFS, this club has been in half-ass transition for a decade IMO, never fully transitioning to something and often reversing due to lack of quality and scoring in the squad. This is the fault of leadership at the club's offices.

I have to say I chuckled at this, because it is true. We have been saying we're in transition at least since 2010, but we have never got anywhere because there has never been any true vision to where we should transition! We bought young attacking talents only to bring in Mourinho, then Conte... Before them Benitez, RDM, AVB - all play very different styles from each other. We then stacked up players for their tactics, and now we bring in the polar opposite manager with what seems minimal support in the market.

Sarri is not blameless. I blamed Mourinho for running a struggling Ivanovic to the ground when there were clearly better alternatives available (FILIPE LUIS !!!!!!!!!). The same with Alonso now, we have an alternative who is worth a shot, being frozen out of the team completely. Alonso was okay for 5 at the back, but in a 4 it's becoming clearer and clearer that he just doesn't cut it.

If one of our academy products put in a performance like Alonso has done lately, he'd be proclaimed "not ready for EPL" and be shipped on loan. Reputation and price tag plays an unbelievable role in Chelsea's player selection, double standards every-fucking-where.

[quickpassnmove 924]

14 minutes ago, manpe said:

I have to say I chuckled at this, because it is true. We have been saying we're in transition at least since 2010, but we have never got anywhere because there has never been any true vision to where we should transition! We bought young attacking talents only to bring in Mourinho, then Conte... Before them Benitez, RDM, AVB - all play very different styles from each other. We then stacked up players for their tactics, and now we bring in the polar opposite manager with what seems minimal support in the market.

Sarri is not blameless. I blamed Mourinho for running a struggling Ivanovic to the ground when there were clearly better alternatives available (FILIPE LUIS !!!!!!!!!). The same with Alonso now, we have an alternative who is worth a shot, being frozen out of the team completely. Alonso was okay for 5 at the back, but in a 4 it's becoming clearer and clearer that he just doesn't cut it.

If one of our academy products put in a performance like Alonso has done lately, he'd be proclaimed "not ready for EPL" and be shipped on loan. Reputation and price tag plays an unbelievable role in Chelsea's player selection, double standards every-fucking-where.

I have to add: now is different from Chelsea's titles in the past 7 years however. Chelsea will not defend their way to title (especially without J.T., superman) and we don't have a Didier or Diego to trouble defenders either.

Now we have Pep, Juergen, and managers like Wolves' and Bournemouth to contend with. I think things have changed and Chelsea need go in fully for a real transition this time. No idea if Maurizio Sarri is an answer; so far, a manager has NOT been the answer (just as AVB has turned up again in discussion here).

[manpe 10,861]

Just now, quickpassnmove said:

I have to add: now is different from Chelsea's titles in the past 7 years however. Chelsea will not defend their way to title (especially without J.T., superman) and we don't have a Didier or Diego to trouble defenders either.

Now we have Pep, Juergen, and managers like Wolves' and Bournemouth to contend with. I think things have changed and Chelsea need go in fully for a real transition this time. No idea if Maurizio Sarri is an answer; so far, a manager has NOT been the answer (just as AVB has turned up again in discussion here).

A transition doesn't depend on the manager as much as it depends on the people behind the curtains. You just have to have a manager who fits the ambitions of where they want the transition to end up at. Sarri does fit the bill of playing quick pass'n'move (  ) football, but now he needs to be fully backed.

[Special Juan 27,424]

9 hours ago, DDA said:

This is the 3rd manager on the trot, Mourinho, Conte and now Sarri who keep on playing out of form or shit players over younger, hungrier or better suited players week in, week out. 

Something is seriously fishy going on behind the scenes. These three managers can't all be blind to the obvious. Player payer is real at Chelsea, we know that but whatever is driving the vehicle of lunacy at Chelsea needs to be addressed for us to fullfil our destiny under Roman.

The team is picked by people behind the scenes, because I don't give a fuck who you are, you must be fucking blind to constantly keep playing under-performing wage thieves like Alonso, Willian, Morata and Fabregas.

The choices made by the board to renew certain contracts, the purchases and the decisions are why we are absolute streets behind City. Why? Because we have bought shite, middle of the road players, updated big contracts for average players and had zero fucking ambition in the last 4-5 years. Zappacosta, Alonso, Morata, Drinkwater etc absolute horrendous, horrendous purchases and don't get me started on the cost of some of them.

There is also no urgency or fore thought to get players like RLC or CHO into the frame whilst players playing in their respected positions go through the fucking motions and collect upward of £200k a week.

The club has no direction what so fucking ever.

[Fulham Broadway 16,832]

Sarri clock is ticking -tick,tock,tick,tock,

Next.....

[mccg 1,528]

Sarri mystified by Chelsea’s second-half mentality, attitude after conceding to Wolves

https://weaintgotnohistory.sbnation.com/2018/12/5/18127992/wolverhampton-wanderers-chelsea-premier-league-post-match-comments-maurizio-sarri

Maybe putting our best dm(aka Kante) in his best position 2nd half might of helped ?! Maybe Sarri's mentality needs looked at asap?!

[mccg 1,528]

Chelsea players had too much confidence, says Maurizio Sarri

"Of course, after this match we lost confidence but maybe it is better because sometimes my players show me they have too much confidence."

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/11572744/sarri-players-had-too-much-confidence

Ffs getting to sound like Jose book of bullshit excuses 

[FabHazard 655]

Sarri should have prioritized wolves game .it is much more easy to get points against wolves than city...Jorginho is the heart of sarri system...he should play every PL game... distance between the players clearly indicate replacements are not adapted to system...we cannot get away with second xi in PL games

[Vesper 28,774]

5 minutes ago, mccg said:

Chelsea players had too much confidence, says Maurizio Sarri

"Of course, after this match we lost confidence but maybe it is better because sometimes my players show me they have too much confidence."

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/11572744/sarri-players-had-too-much-confidence

Ffs getting to sound like Jose book of bullshit excuses 

It does sound quite Mourinho-like. I am not a fan of using players' emotional states as rational for on field performances.

[Laylabelle 9,351]

But why would they be over confident. Wolves are mid table.. We're not exactly sitting top miles from the rest so no reason to be. We knew we needed this win with City coming up... 

[Fulham Broadway 16,832]

I remember the same allegations levelled at Pep during his first season - however the difference being he was given unlimited cash -£150million on fullbacks, then gets LaPorte as well etc. I'm also seeing a pattern of just employing 2 strikers in the full squad. Pretty sure Conte and Sarri would prefer a minimum of 3.

So it comes back to our board in a way, in terms of cash flow for managers. What they do is just get another gaffer in, which masks the problems. Some blame with allowing sari to bring Jorginho when we have the best defensive midfielder in the World already. 

Talking of which if Jorginho starts against Citeh I am going down the pub ay half time... 

[Vesper 28,774]

Chelsea boss Maurizio Sarri is tactically stubborn and lacks a Plan B

https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/chelsea/chelsea-boss-maurizio-sarri-is-tactically-stubborn-and-lacks-a-plan-b-a4010166.html

 

Maurizio Sarri is starting to discover what it feels like when the honeymoon period as manager of Chelsea is over.

It would be foolish to suggest Sarri’s job is under threat after just five months, although Luiz Felipe Scolari and Andre Villas-Boas might suggest otherwise. However, the Italian needs to add a new game-plan to his repertoire sooner rather than later.

After a very promising start to life as Chelsea coach, there is more evidence that opponents have figured out his tactics.

The results alone make grim reading: since winning their first five Premier League fixtures, Chelsea have added just four more in the next 10. They should have secured a fifth last night but missed a host of chances at 1-0 and then gifted Wolves two sloppy goals.

Sarri questioned his players’ poor reaction after Nino Espirito Santo’s men drew level, intimating they were solely at fault for the defeat.

“We were suddenly another team,” he said. “Without the right distances, our football, I don’t know why.

“I am really very worried, not for the result but for the fact we didn’t react to the first goal. We didn’t react at all, so I am really very worried for this.”

However, all those connected with Chelsea might think Sarri could have done more to inspire a comeback.

Sarri is so committed to his ‘vision’ of play that he will not alter from it one bit. This means his substitutions are merely like-for-like rather than  anything out of the ordinary.

snip

[kellzfresh 7,229]

Why Chelsea are still adapting to Sarri as Man City approach footballing nirvana

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/46442319

Quote

Three of Chelsea's six league titles have come in their first season under a new manager, which is a feather in the cap for the club's HR department and explains why hopes were high this season when they went unbeaten in their first 12 matches.

Maurizio Sarri is the first Premier League coach to avoid defeat in his opening dozen matches yet they head into Saturday's home game with Manchester City 10 points adrift of the reigning champions.

Pep Guardiola is attempting to win his ninth league title in his 11th season as a top-flight manager but even he couldn't win the Premier League in his first season with City.

If the modern breed of super-managers is defined by specific stylistic approaches then frankly it makes sense that they can't just bowl into a new club, click their fingers and expect the players to adapt immediately. We've come a long way since Bruce Rioch's blueprint when he was appointed Arsenal manager in 1995: short hair, don't be late, wear a tie, be polite and get married.

Even so, it only took the Manchester City players a year of adaption under Guardiola before they began to exert the sort of full-spectrum dominance enjoyed by Juventus in Serie A, the very team who repeatedly prevented Sarri from landing the league title with Napoli. He ended his three years there with the best points-per-game rate of any Napoli manager in Serie A history (2.27) but this was only enough for two second places and a third.

There is a well-documented amount of mutual respect between Sarri and Guardiola but the former must know that his good start at Stamford Bridge has not reduced the size of the challenge he faces.

The underlying numbers of both clubs support the case that Guardiola is approaching footballing nirvana at City while Chelsea are still adjusting to their new manager's demands.

Using Opta's sequences model we can see that they are the only two teams this season to record more than 300 possession sequences of 10 or more passes, considerably more than the other teams in the "big six".

But while a third of City's have ended in a shot or a touch in the penalty area (defined as a build-up attack), only 18% of Chelsea's have, not only a lower proportion than City, but also Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham as well.

In simple terms, City's domination of the ball offers epoch-defining penetration, while Chelsea are on the ball a lot, but too often without much end product.

Team	10+ pass sequences	Sequences ending with touch in box
Correct as of 3 December
Manchester City	347	112	32.3%
Arsenal	206	49	23.8%
Liverpool	254	53	20.9%
Tottenham Hotspur	184	36	19.6%
Chelsea	328	60	18.3%
Manchester United	155	20	12.9%

Debate about Chelsea's current approach caught fire after they were outclassed by Tottenham at Wembley in matchweek 13, with Sarri's subsequent criticism of N'Golo Kante dominating headlines.

Chelsea's new manager has installed his own Neopolitan operating system in midfield in the form of Jorginho, which has pushed Kante out to the right, as evidenced in the map below.

The former Leicester man has seen a bump in the number of touches per 90 minutes he is making on the right flank but has dropped by 12.4 in his own half.

Once master of the defensive half, Kante is now running a new business elsewhere that may not be entirely suitable, despite a pair of assists that matches the combined total from his first two seasons at the club.

For his part, Jorginho has already recorded the third and fourth highest number of successful passes ever made in a Premier League game (behind two Guardiola players from last season, which partly explains why he was so pained that the Italy international chose Stamford Bridge over Etihad Stadium in the summer) but without a cutting edge Jorginho's work will go unrewarded.

Even worse, if pressed effectively - as Dele Alli did for Tottenham last month - Jorginho can effectively become a weak link, the dynamo in a wheel that won't turn. [Incidentally, more players have recorded 100 or more successful passes in a single game in 2018-19 than all Premier League campaigns between 2003-04 and 2010-11 combined].

Most successful passes in a Premier League game
Date	Player	Opponent	Successful passes
04/03/18	Ilkay Gündogan (Man City)	Chelsea	167
31/03/18	Fernandinho (Man City)	Everton	164
23/09/18	Jorginho (Chelsea)	West Ham United	162
26/08/18	Jorginho (Chelsea)	Newcastle United	158

Ultimately, football philosophy can only be reflected on at leisure if that team is scoring enough goals and in Alvaro Morata and Olivier Giroud, Sarri has a pair of strikers who have scored a combined six times from 54 shots, while Eden Hazard has not scored in the league since the start of October, a relative drought his expected goals overperformance had hinted was in the post.

Guardiola, in contrast has both Sergio Aguero and Raheem Sterling on eight goals already, and though he inherited those two, just as Sarri has Morata and Giroud, the difference is obvious.

Dries Mertens scored 46 league goals in Sarri's final two seasons at Napoli and finding or buying someone who can replicate this threat is the next big task in Sarri's inbox.

 

[Tomo 21,733]

23 hours ago, Jason said:

Nobody is asking Sarri to make a 180 degrees turn on his football but if he can't make minor tactical adjustments to make things work for the time being, then he won't last very long. You know well enough that inflexibility won't get managers far in the Premier League and Sarri is certainly showing that now, with his tactics and team selection. Plus, where is this Sarri-ball that we have heard so much of? Where is the cohesive, combination play in the attacking third? We've barely seen it. Only thing we have gotten from his football so far is more possession and passes but really, what's the point of that when we don't create enough or proper goalscoring chances? It was the same under Conte and Mourinho. And seeing us bossing some of these smaller teams is not really different to what we saw under Conte, Mourinho etc as we tended to dominate those games as well in the past.

Sorry for the late reply, i agree on minor adjustments but the base of his philosophy has to remain the same, we signed up for it so telling him to adapt is like signing Ederson and telling him not to use his passing range.

As for the play side of it, we are definitely a lot better in possession than any point under Conte or Jose, for all our other faults right now we are still playing out of the back well and having 65% ish possession per game. As for the overall play of patterns and combinations in my opinion it's largely right now down to the lack of pre season and time on the training pitch, since September we haven't had a free midweek which means fuck all if any training time (high match turnovers mean training is basically warmdowns) which is a killer when trying to learn a new system. Imagine if say you were taking regular exams that you've only just took on but your schedule means little to no time to revise, your performance will slow down after a while.

In a way Bournemouth knocking us out could be a blessing because as much as a semi final is nice, we desperately need some time on the training pitch to aid us in the home straight.

[Jase 43,479]

1 hour ago, Tomo said:

Sorry for the late reply, i agree on minor adjustments but the base of his philosophy has to remain the same, we signed up for it so telling him to adapt is like signing Ederson and telling him not to use his passing range.

As for the play side of it, we are definitely a lot better in possession than any point under Conte or Jose, for all our other faults right now we are still playing out of the back well and having 65% ish possession per game. As for the overall play of patterns and combinations in my opinion it's largely right now down to the lack of pre season and time on the training pitch, since September we haven't had a free midweek which means fuck all if any training time (high match turnovers mean training is basically warmdowns) which is a killer when trying to learn a new system. Imagine if say you were taking regular exams that you've only just took on but your schedule means little to no time to revise, your performance will slow down after a while.

In a way Bournemouth knocking us out could be a blessing because as much as a semi final is nice, we desperately need some time on the training pitch to aid us in the home straight.

Maybe you are right that the lack of time on the training pitch is causing the issues that we are seeing now BUT that is no excuse for Sarri to continue picking under-performing players or players are so obviously not fit for his system. If he continues to do that, then how is he going to get the players to play the way he wants us to play? Our squad isn't perfect but there are definitely some players more suited to his style than others. That is one point and the second thing here is, it points to a lack tactical flexibility on his part. No one is asking him to sacrifice his football but is he really that stubborn or blind to make minor adjustments to ensure things work for the time being without compromising his football? There have been comparisons between Sarri's struggles now with Guardiola but has he not looked at Guardiola's mistakes in his first season and tried to not make them here? Could even throw in Klopp's initial period into the equation here. It certainly feels like he's showing the same naivety that Guardiola and Klopp showed when they first came to England. 

[Tomo 21,733]

26 minutes ago, Jason said:

Maybe you are right that the lack of time on the training pitch is causing the issues that we are seeing now BUT that is no excuse for Sarri to continue picking under-performing players or players are so obviously not fit for his system. If he continues to do that, then how is he going to get the players to play the way he wants us to play? Our squad isn't perfect but there are definitely some players more suited to his style than others. That is one point and the second thing here is, it points to a lack tactical flexibility on his part. No one is asking him to sacrifice his football but is he really that stubborn or blind to make minor adjustments to ensure things work for the time being without compromising his football? There have been comparisons between Sarri's struggles now with Guardiola but has he not looked at Guardiola's mistakes in his first season and tried to not make them here? Could even throw in Klopp's initial period into the equation here. It certainly feels like he's showing the same naivety that Guardiola and Klopp showed when they first came to England. 

But to play devils advocate he could also be looking at how they have both been rewarded for sticking to their process and not panicking, Pep took the short term hit to implement his style and as soon as he got more suitable players to go along with a the rest being a year into his training he's arguably created the best PL team ever, Klopp looked like he was neglecting his defense and keeper at one point (and maybe to an extent he was) but he waited for suitable players and now has probably the best in both positions in the league.

Re subtle changes, I think (am trying to convince myself) that he is slowly looking at things in that regard, he took Alonso off vs Fulham  (and i think Zappa might start with Azpi LB on Saturday to help combat Mahrez cutting in) and he's rotated Jorginho off which is the one thing i thought he would never do, the Christmas period will tell us a lot either way.

[DDA 9,690]

6 hours ago, Tomo said:

he's arguably created the best PL team ever,

United 99. This City team isn't even close to that United team, yet!!!

[Johnnyeye 7,440]

1 hour ago, DDA said:

United 99. This City team isn't even close to that United team, yet!!!

agree, City will always remain in the shadow of United no matter how good a team they are.