Nine matches and a little over one month into his tenure as Chelsea head coach, Liam Rosenior continues to insist that his side do not have to pick between style and substance.
“I’m asking them to press in a completely different way that they’ve never done before and hardly had any practice at,” he said after a 3-2 Champions League comeback win away to Napoli on January 28. “Time over the next few weeks will help us get better and improve, but we still need to win games.”
They are managing that, with seven wins from Rosenior’s first nine matches, including taking a maximum 12 points from four Premier League games, most recently beating Wolverhampton Wanderers 3-1 at Molineux.
Watch how Chelsea press from a drop ball four minutes into the start of the second half. One of the “triggers” — a word Rosenior has said to reporters about the differences in how and when Chelsea look to squeeze opponents — is a backward pass to the goalkeeper, where the No 9 presses while cutting off the lane back to the centre-back who passed the ball.
The intention is to have the winger (here, Pedro Neto) arc their run to cut off the wide pass, allowing the full-back (Malo Gusto) to jump to the opposition full-back. When they execute this, Chelsea are one-v-one on that side of the field.
In that instance, Wolves defender Ladislav Krejci is forced to play long, with Trevoh Chalobah winning the aerial duel against Tolu Arokodare. He has Moises Caicedo in support, with the Chelsea midfielder typically dropping off to support the back line when possible.
Another example can be found in the win over Pafos in the Champions League. The “trigger” this time is a backwards throw-in. No 9 Liam Delap cuts the pitch in half by closing off the return pass from centre-back to goalkeeper, while Neto makes sure to lock the outside centre-back by the touchline.
Pressing traps like the one above — schemes where Chelsea try to bait passes out wide before locking on — were a theme under Enzo Maresca too, before his departure on New Year’s Day.
Where Rosenior is a bit different, having described his style as “very similar” and with “minor tweaks” to his predecessor, is taking more risks with the ball (playing out) and without the ball (pressing).
“I wanted to go man-for-man all over the pitch,” he said after the win in Naples. “I wanted to be really aggressive and Napoli were very clever after 20-25 minutes. I felt we won the ball back very high in good areas in the first 20 minutes.
“When they started to miss our press out and went a little bit more direct, the distances were a little bit bigger. We corrected that. We were still man-to-man in the second half but we started a bit deeper with our press and I think that helped our composure.”
The Napoli match was the third of a three-match run — after beating Pafos in the Champions League and Crystal Palace in the Premier League — where Chelsea faced a 3-4-3 and had to tweak their press.
Here we see the same kind of trap, as Napoli have both wing-backs deep, plus three centre-backs and two midfielders on the edge of the penalty area, trying to draw Chelsea onto them in order to play upfield.
This time, Marc Cucurella makes the full-back-to-wing-back jump down the left. Chelsea leave the far side (Napoli’s left centre-back and wing-back) open, as winger Estevao tucks in onto the central midfielder.
Caicedo and Reece James, the latter moonlighting at centre-back, are spare men (yellow dots). Wesley Fofana struggled one-v-one isolated against No 9 Rasmus Hojlund, as Rosenior’s back four comprised of three full-backs struggled.
Here are two more examples of those traps in the away win over Crystal Palace, one down each side. For the first, Caicedo has dropped off from Adam Wharton too early and Chris Richards can break the first line of pressure easily.
Wharton’s pass into Jean-Philippe Mateta sticks and Benoit Badiashile fouls the striker.
A few minutes later, Caicedo is better at jumping onto Wharton. Neto traps right centre-back Jaydee Canvot into playing the inside pass, and the Ecuadorian dispossesses Wharton.
Trying to adapt Chelsea’s pressing principles on the fly is a bold strategy for Rosenior, but his comments read as a staunch belief that he must implement his tactical ideas on the team, otherwise there was no reason for him joining from BlueCo sister club Strasbourg in France.
Ligue 1 is a notorious man-to-man pressing league, part of the reason why there is a successful pathway for defenders into England’s top flight (Badiashile, Mamadou Sarr and Axel Disasi are Chelsea purchases from Ligue 1 in recent years).
Rosenior’s Strasbourg, who often played a back three, would press man-to-man at times, but were equally content to sit off and could threaten on the counter-attack.
With better players, a deeper squad and bigger expectations at Chelsea, he is more interested in being aggressive. By the time they travel to Hull City for the FA Cup third round tie on February 13, Rosenior will have taken charge of 11 matches in little more than a month.
Next up is the visit of Leeds United, who were once the avant-garde pressing team in the Premier League, with Marcelo Bielsa’s aggressive man-to-man principles a cornerstone of the approach that led them to a ninth-place finish in the 2020-21 season.
Rosenior is not that extreme, though he is trying to instil the kind of aggressive out-of-possession ideas not seen since Mauricio Pochettino was head coach. Last season, under Maresca, was a six-year high for the number of Premier League opponents Chelsea have caught offside, but these are increasingly in deeper positions.
Chelsea’s final-third regains have dropped off this season, down to 3.7 per match after averaging at least five per game in the three previous full terms. This, though, is in the context of a league with added physicality and a re-emergence of long passes in build-up, which reduce the opportunities to make regains close to goal.
Chelsea’s 39 final-third regains in the Champions League opening phase ranked ninth, and they did win the ball back further upfield than any other team. Translating that into the Premier League, though, is another challenge.
Pressing man-to-man is not necessarily going to increase high turnovers either. This approach shuts off passing lanes and can leave teams light at the back. With a vulnerability to conceding from crosses this season, Chelsea are evidently weak at centre-back — and direct teams like Brentford and Palace have threatened them.
Their press has taken on different structures/shapes at times, looking more like a 4-4-2 against West Ham and Wolves, two teams who split their centre-backs in build-up to increase distances (making it harder to press) and want to progress the ball down the wings.
“The availability of your players always affects your system,” Rosenior said at the Emirates after a League Cup semi-final second-leg defeat against Arsenal. Chelsea pressed in a 5-2-3 there, struggling initially to deal with Jurrien Timber as the spare man, because their wing-backs were pinned deep.
Rosenior tweaked this after 10 minutes, sending Cucurella and Gusto further forward in the press, and as a result Arsenal goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga started kicking longer into the channels.
Now there are obvious risks for Chelsea defending man-to-man more, though simplifying their approach makes particular sense considering their heavy rotation policy. If the 11 players on the pitch are going to change constantly between and within matches, complex strategies are harder to implement.
But for a team with rapid forwards, plus Caicedo’s outstanding ball-winning ability, defending in this way makes the most of their capabilities.
Top-level coaches, almost unanimously, consider pressing the hardest (and most time-consuming) part of the game to coach, but there is no way to be a dominant, possession-based team without it.