Chelsea lose again and no longer even resemble a team particularly trying to win football matches

Enzo Maresca has overseen a frustrating second half of the season so far at Chelsea

Mikel Merino’s header provided Arsenal with the slimmest of victories over Chelsea – but in truth the visitors never looked remotely like getting back into the game.

Going away to the best defence in the Premier League is a tough assignment for any team, and if the context were different, this may be a bit of a shrug of a result for Chelsea.

The problem is that context cannot be ignored, and nor can the nature of yet another unbelievably lifeless Chelsea performance.

Enzo Maresca’s side were unexpectedly excellent over the first half of the campaign, but have looked overall woeful since Christmas.

There are things you can point to in Maresca’s defence: the loss of young buck Nicholas Jackson to injury, Cole Palmer’s curious dry spell, Robert Sanchez being quite possibly the worst goalkeeper in the Premier League this season.

But it’s impossible to look at Chelsea over the past couple of months and think anything other than that the players they have are playing far beneath themselves almost entirely across the board.

READ NEXT: Cole Palmer faces England fitness doubt as Chelsea absence against Arsenal explained

Having a couple at a time is normal. Even Liverpool have had individuals you could single out for criticism at various points this season. But when it’s as endemic as it is for Chelsea at the moment, you have to wonder whether the manager is getting the absolute most he can out of his side.

The Italian has previous for this. Maresca’s Leicester won all but seven of their first 32 games in the Championship last season, and sat 12 points clear of second-placed Leeds in mid-February.

And then it all started going wrong. Leicester lost six of their next ten, and at one point dropped down to third before rallying just enough to restore themselves to the top of the table.

Chelsea overlooked that significant wobble at their peril, and are now suffering from the same kind of mid-season decline.

That’s particularly curious, because you could not particularly describe Chelsea as an all-action, high octane side playing a style that lends itself towards blowing up in the second half of the campaign.

Maresca has in fact started to rotate his squad more over the second half of the campaign, especially as he is no longer able just to play a complete second string in the Conference League – yet the side’s form has only suffered the more for it.

Instead, there is a sense – which we suspect many Chelsea fans would enthusiastically agree with – that Maresca is simply too stubborn for his own good.

We criticised Mikel Arteta last week for a creeping sense of his Arsenal side as being too systematised and non-improvisational for their own good this season, but at least with Arsenal there is always a sense that they are actually trying to win football games; they just don’t always do it very convincingly around the opposition box.

Watching Chelsea feels more like watching a training exercise based around maintaining control of the ball, with no particular emphasis on getting the ball into the net. The longer Chelsea have worked under Maresca, the more that has been the case.

All urgency and incision has gone, replaced by a set of players who look too frightened of upsetting their manager to actually take calculated risks.

Although we presume he must have thought he was making a different point, Maresca himself effectively confirmed that at a press conference last week, saying: “Fernandez knows that if he doesn’t play back, I will change him. If the keeper plays long, I will change him. This is what we have.”

“My message to Filip (Jorgensen) was: ‘If you play long ball, I will change you.’ So he was just doing what I told him to.”

You might think Maresca might have learned some lessons last year from that fact that Leicester had over 70% possession ten times in the Championship, but lost four of them. Chelsea have done it twice in the Premier League this season; those games were a defeat at Ipswich and a goalless draw at Everton.

Meanwhile, Leicester were forced to take a rare minority share of the ball in both of their games against Southampton; Leicester won 4-1 and 5-0, two of their biggest wins of the season.

Chelsea’s lowest possession number in a game this season was their 41% against Brighton in September; they won 4-2. When they went to Amex last month, Chelsea had 69% possession; they lost 3-0.

You might equally and fairly point out that Maresca’s Leicester and Chelsea sides tended to lose when they had less than 50% possession. But the point is that there is more than one way to win a game, and even the best teams sometimes have to play the side in front of them rather than sticking exclusively to a single unchanging style.

At the moment, Maresca’s refusal to accept that is thoroughly to Chelsea’s disadvantage.

MORE CHELSEA COVERAGE ON F365…

👉 Chelsea make ‘almost irresistible offer’ to sign Barcelona star as Boehly ‘returns with greater force’

👉 Romano confirms Chelsea ‘agreement’ to sign second Sporting star with two transfer details revealed

👉 Liverpool ‘set to beat’ Newcastle, Chelsea in race to sign PL star with transfer ‘expected to be struck’

Click here to read article