This premier league fixture played on Saturday, September 26th at the Hawthorns Stadium, turned out to be a high scoring game with lots of ups and downs. Chelsea came into this season with a lot of high hopes after spending over €200million in the transfer market. Meanwhile, West Brom have just been promoted to the top division after an impressive campaign in the championship. The final score here was 3–3, but the match was pretty much a game of two halves, both teams scoring 3 in either half. Let us jump into the technical analysis of the game:
Formations
West Bromwich Albion manager Slaven Billić came up with a 5–4–1 formation which on paper, is mostly termed as a defensive formation in which a team sits back and defends trying to pounce on any counter-attacking opportunity they get. But going through the game, one could see that even though the formation was defensive, the approach with which West Brom played the game was far more aggressive than expected.
Chelsea fielded a basic 4–2–3–1 formation but changed things a bit by putting Timo Werner on the left and Tammy Abraham upfront. Playing against a defensive 5–4–1 formation, the main tactical aim of a team is to create things in the center by playing passes between the lines. This was Frank Lampard’s aim getting into the game, but it did not plan out well enough as West Brom crowded the central area, which provided the Blues space for the fullback to attack into.
First Half
Getting into the game, we saw the Blues trying to create passes between the lines in the center. A normal defensive 5–4–1 would ask its wingers to cover the fullbacks initially, but in this case, the wingers came towards the center to try and cover the spaces between the lines in the center, and the full-backs were left to be tracked by the wing-backs or wide center-backs of West Brom (which is clearly a more attacking approach). This was mainly a counter-pressing approach that Billić had come up with. This clearly was creating a problem for Chelsea, as whenever they got the ball to Reece James and Marcus Alonso, they were not left with many options to pass to. This was because Kante and Kovacic were marked by their wingers, and the attackers Werner, Mount, and Abraham were busy engaging defenders. There was no one dropping and providing support to build from the back.
This way, Chelsea were forced to get Kante upfront to help with the attack, which was all that West Brom wanted, to have one less man to deal with when the transition happens and they go to attack. Of course, the goals Chelsea conceded were individual mistakes. The first one was a diagonal that was misjudged by Alonso and West Brom capitalized with Robinson getting the goal and the second goal was clearly Silva’s mistake. Then there was the third goal where Alonso clearly left his man unmarked, who then had an easy tap in. After the three goals, Chelsea had to change something and they did in the second half.
2nd Half
Lampard started with making a couple of changes to his team, bringing on Azpilicueta for Marcus Alonso at left-back and replacing Kovacic with Callum Hudson-Odoi. Bringing on Hudson Odoi meant Mount would play in a more central role which initiated changes as Kai Havertz who was completely central in the first half, was now approaching the wings to provide additional options to the full-backs when they had the ball.
With these minor tweaks in tactics, Chelsea started to click, showing great mentality to come back in the game. Mount, who was clearly the best player in the match, scored a goal from distance to kick-off the comeback. Hudson-Odoi performed brilliantly and also scored Chelsea’s second goal after brilliantly combining with Havertz. Later, constant pressure from Chelsea led to them getting the equalizer deep into stoppage time.
What does come out of this game is that surely Chelsea have invested and brought new talents to their side, but maybe they haven’t had enough time to blend in the team together. Lampard is still not sure about his best formation, and also Ziyech, Pulisic, and Chilwell have to come back from injuries and can have a major impact on their performances. In conclusion, we cannot really judge Chelsea’s new team so early in the season, but they’ve definitely shown a positive mentality by not giving up.
About the Author: Namit Sharma is a student of MBA(Sports Management) at Symbiosis School of Sports Sciences, and a football enthusiast obsessed with an in-depth tactical analysis of football. A big supporter of the flexibility of tactics and formations during a football match.
Namit is a Creative Writer at HeadKick.co
