After a really positive summer for Chelsea, there was a lot of excitement for the Blues first game of the season yesterday against Crystal Palace.
It’s fair to say it disappointed, both as a performance from Enzo Maresca’s team, and as a spectacle. On the London is Blue podcast they discussed just why they thought that was.
Chelsea and Palace wild in front of goal
There wasn’t much good attacking play from either side, and when there was, it was let down by dreadful attempts on goal, as podcasters Dan Dormer and Nick Verlaney pointed out:
“There were 31 shots in the goalless draw between Chelsea and Crystal Palace,” Dormer said, quoting OPTA.
“The most shots without scoring in a Matchday 1 Premier League game since Burnley and Southampton in 2018/2019 with 34 shots. Wayward.”
That would be an impressive stat were it not for the “Matchday 1 qualifier”. That makes it number one on a list of hundreds rather than tens of thousands.
Still, their analysis of why it had been so bad was much more interesting.
Early season rust blamed for poor attacking
“It was pretty ugly,” Verlaney said.
“You had really good players struggling to keep the ball. Andrey Santos who scored 10 goals in Ligue 1 last year, scored a few bangers as well, he put it in Row Z, couldn’t get his foot around it properly. Cole Palmer, from acute angles, just trying some weird stuff. That’s pretty much week one of the season stuff, they will continue to refine that.”
That feels a little generous to us – did Palmer forget how to shoot in his paltry 3 weeks off? Are we really saying simultaneously that these players are rusty from lack of action, and also tired from so much summer play?
To us, the reason Palmer took mad shots was because the team wasn’t creating anything collectively.