Winning individual battles makes a HUGE difference

Lets look at some of Saturday's key battles

Good afternoon Ladies and Gents,

Today I am going to take a look at some of the key battles from Saturday’s performance v Arsenal and how/why we won that individual battle.

Lets start with the picture above and Marc Cucurella v Bukayo Saka!

For me this was Cucurella’s best performance in a Chelsea shirt, just pipping his Dortmund (H) performance last season.

Saka on average equates 0.85 xGI (Expected Goal Involvement) which is relatively high, Cucurella restricted him to an xGI of just 0.16 which is massive, in effect he restricted their most influential attacker from being involved in attacks.

Stats are great at understanding what happened but not how it happened, for me the reasons Cucurella was so successful on Saturday was his aggression, his anticipation and his intelligence. He was so aggressive every time the ball came in to Saka’s feet. Usually a quick footed, speedy winger would be given a yard or two to face up a full back before they pounce and attempt to win the ball or jockey them down the line, Sake loves it when his opponent does that to him because his trickery and ability gets him through that situation with ease for the most part. Cucurella got so tight to Saka that he couldn’t turn, he could only set the ball back or lose it, with Cucu even tackling him from behind to nick the ball from between his legs.

If you are to keep a player like Saka quiet you need to do two things;

1. Keep his back to goal - Cucurella did this.

2. Allow no space for him to dribble into - We left him no space at all.

The centre backs v Gabriel Jesus

Jesus fluctuated between which centre back he was battling, early in the game he was closer to Colwill, Levi won the first few headers with ease and then he moved over to Silva who was equally as dominant. It wasn’t all in our centre backs’ favour but Jesus didn’t do much with the few chances to create that he had, he did draw Silva into a foul which drew a yellow card for the brazillian!

Colwill won 6/9 aerial duels. had 97 touches and had a mammoth 12 defensive actions! Silva had 62 touches, a pass completion of 93% and made 7 defensive actions! A really dominant display from our centre halves, that limited Jesus to a miniscule 25 touches, 3 shots where none of them hit the target and just 1 pass into the final third.

The midfield battle

Our midfield were excellent on Saturday, they have such a strong balance between them and there is very little that we lack between Caicedo, Gallagher and Enzo. We have pace, power, agility, leadership and really good decision makers amongst other attributes.

The best thing our midfield did was not allow Odegaard any space to get the ball and drive or any space for him to pass into, we limited Odegaard to 36 touches in 78 minutes where he generally averages around 50-70 per match. That was a massive feature in why the game went our way and why any game gets dominated by a team, the midfield battle has to be won.

Chelsea overrun Jorginho with energy and pace which is what lots of teams done to Chelsea between 2018-22 when he was the base of our midfield, him playing also made Declan Rice more advanced which worked into our favour and realy allowed Gallagher lots of space to pick the ball up.

Cole Palmer dropping into midfield from attack really confused the Arsenal Midfield and Defence, nobody knew how to pick him up or who’s man he was, it allowed us to overload on whichever side he dropped into. He was absolutely everywhere and was the best player on the pitch in my view!

Hope you all enjoyed this article and I will try to bring more like this over the coming weeks!

Luke Rushbrook