by 
Chelsea is stuck in a mid-season rut.
After an excellent start to the season which had the blues as titles closest to Liverpool, the Enzo Maresca team is now faced with a song for the champions League squares while the season enters its last third .
You can identify the tireless draw in Everton on December 22 when the slowdown started. Before this stage, Chelsea had won 34 points over 16 Premier League games; Since then, it has been new.
Throughout this race, a dynamic in the past fascinating has become expired.
Here are the figures that show how and why …
Exceeds
The 3-0 Friday evening defeat in Brighton was the most lifeless attack of attack of the Chelsea season, titled by the fact that they failed to manage a single shot on the target (SOT) In a Premier League match for the first time since September 2021.
“The bad feeling is that we seem that we can easily concede chances and that we find it difficult to create chances,” said Maresca afterwards, but the second of these problems is by far the most important.
During their last nine championship games, Chelsea granted an average of 4.8 stupid per game, a small increase in the 4.2 they abandoned in the first 16 games.
However, in terms of their own fools, there was a sharp decline, from 5.8 per game to only 4.4.
In other words, Chelsea’s defense has always been relatively generous: there are seven teams in the Premier League who abandon less than four fools in an average match, better than the rate of the blues, even during the superb race before -Christmas.
But where once they have been able to exceed the teams, they now manage less foolish than the opponents themselves.
Expected objectives
This was Chelsea’s attacking threat in the first half of the season that even with their recent drops, they still rank second behind Liverpool for expected goals (XG) throughout the campaign.
However, no team in the upper half of the table has a worst record in terms of XG compared to the real objectives marked, suggesting a lack of clinical finish in the front line of Maresca.
Again, to all those who watched Chelsea over a long period, that will not surprise. But, once again, it is a weakness that the blues have been able to overcome their best and that cause them problems now.
Statistics for individual correspondence clearly show this. When creativity is rare, impressiveness becomes essential, with Nottingham Forest the clearest example from the top of the will. The Nuno Espirito Santo team is only 16th in the League for XG, but has surpassed this metric in a laminate of 15 of their 25 games. This is a large part of the reason why they are seated in third position.
Chelsea, on the other hand, only surpassed XG in six games – and not in one since their bad shape of form started in mid -December.
Style change
Perhaps the greatest frustration among the Chelsea supporters was the obvious change in their style of play as the season took place, Maresca pushing for a more patient accumulation and more control.
The figures suggest that he managed to orchestrate this change. Chelsea has an average of 62% possession in their last nine championship matches, against 57% in the first 16.
The defeat of Brighton of the weekend saw Chelsea trying a summit of 776 assists, more than 350 more than during the 4-2 victory on the same team at Stamford Bridge in September.
But by implementing this style, Maresca has clearly abandoned part of Chelsea’s strength in the transition and the opponents are now preparing to frustrate, knowing that the Blues find it difficult to break down the defenses.
With Brighton last week, the matches in which Chelsea finished most of the passes – in Ipswich and Everton in December – also saw them score.
Palmer was praised
The injuries in the front line of Maresca clearly amplified the problem during the last fortnight, and with Nicolas Jackson, Marc Guiu and Noni Madueke all sidelined with the problems of the hamstrings, the situation does not seem ready to improve anytime soon.
Among these players, Jackson is the biggest lack. Although barely a prolific finisher – he had not scored in eight championship games during his injury, the longest drought in his blues – Jackson career opens up matches with his ability to mix the narrow affair game with sparkling races.
His absence clearly embarrassed Cole Palmer in a third front in Brighton last week. Although you can traditionally consider Palmer as the creative supplier of Jackson in the center-forward, this relationship was in fact more prolific upside down this season, Jackson helping four of the goals of the Palmer League.
Only Savinho to Erling Haaland and Jacob Murphy in Alexander Isak gave more.
Midfielder
With Chelsea’s attack, the failed attack, normally, one could turn to the midfielder to obtain support, but the pair of Maresca’s first choice does not represent a threat of natural objective.
Moises Caicedo is a player who holds a player and a overworked at this (no midfielder in the Premier League has played no more minutes this season), with a single goal in his name this quarter.
Enzo Fernandez has many more attack license, but still only three goals. It is not a coincidence that they – with the four assists of the Argentine League – came in a single purple patch of six games which led the best Chelsea race of the season: a draw 1- 1 with Arsenal in November followed by five consecutive victories.
On each side of this, attacking the production of the midfielder was almost nonexistent, with the backups Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Romeo Lavia (which is injured anyway) at the same time to mark in the League.
The TransferMarkt statistics website officially categorizes Palmer as a midfielder, but were you to push English in the front category, the four goals of Chelsea of the midfield would be the first of the division, alongside Ipswich, Crystal Palace and Brentford.
