Avoiding the Drop

As a Liverpool fan, I was really hoping that something like yesterday’s 2-0 win over Chelsea was coming. Liverpool have (for those of you that haven’t been paying attention) been off to their worst start since something like 1950, and have been flirting with the relegation zone for most of October. There’s still talent on that team, but it’s been harder and harder to find as results got worse; up until yesterday, Syrgiakos Kyrgiakos was the team’s best player for the season.

The win means that Liverpool – with ten points out of six games – are now riding three straight wins; they’ve firmly entrenched themselves in the “rest of the pack” that’s trailing the top four, sitting on fifteen points with five other teams. This article isn’t about Liverpool, though; it’s about Chelsea.

See, if you read certain articles today, this was a return to glory for the Reds and a sign of structural flaws from the Blues. In reality, it’s neither; Chelsea are still in first place, and Liverpool are still a long way from the Champions League. Liverpool won the game, sure, and it could kick-start their season a bit…but it’s not like Chelsea were exposed as some fraudulent team that has no business playing in Europe.

Consider this quote (from The Guardian‘s match report):

There is a cadre of veterans in Carlo Ancelotti’s team and while their wisdom looked a great asset when Spartak Moscow were beaten 4-1 at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League on Wednesday, they had not saved anything like enough vigour to withstand Liverpool. Fernando Torres, scorer of the goals, gave a magnificent display and his clincher was superb.

I get what they’re saying: Liverpool looked far more vibrant in the first half. Most of the play was in Chelsea’s end, and Liverpool made Chelsea pay with two goals from Torres, who (for perhaps the first time this season) finally looked interested in the game. This was a marked difference, of course, from how they played against Napoli on Thursday, or against Bolton last week, or against Blackburn a few weeks ago, or…well, really, a marked difference from how they’ve played ALL SEASON LONG.

So, if you’re Chelsea in the week leading up to this game, everything you’ve seen on this Liverpool team indicates that, well, they suck. Because your most recent game film from Liverpool (which was three days ago) showed a lackluster performance against Napoli followed by 15 minutes of Steven Gerrard pretending he was back in Istanbul. You’re aware that there’s potential for those kinds of outbursts, but you’re also aware that this team is struggling and that they’re probably not playing particularly well as a unit.

Oh, sure; you’ll worry about Torres. You’ll make sure you get all over him, because he seems to not like being touched this year. You’ll also probably sink back and play a bit deeper, because your two main midfielders – Frank Lampard and Michael Essien – are out. That means you’re looking at a counterattacking game (the kind that Napoli showed Liverpool were vulnerable to). That’s your tactic: sit deep, invite the pressure, and play Liverpool on the break…especially since there are two fullbacks you can probably exploit and a marked lack of speed from the centerbacks.

All of this makes sense. It didn’t work, but that’s hardly Chelsea’s fault; there wasn’t really any way for them to know that this was the game that would pique Liverpool’s interest. If it didn’t happen against Blackpool or Everton or Manchester United, why Chelsea?

And so the tactics didn’t work; at the end of the day, Chelsea were still top and Liverpool were still short of where they wanted to be. You wouldn’t know that from reading more of that Guardian match report, though:

There will be a need for rebuilding and although the vast means [Roman Abramovich] employed after completing his takeover are not expected to made available again the cost could still be rather high.

Wait, what? Rebuilding? It’s a loss. They happen. They don’t mean that the whole of the team needs to be gutted and reformed, they just mean that Chelsea started off this game with a set of tactics that made sense on paper, only to find that the team they were playing against was suddenly motivated.

Plus, Chelsea figured out their problems after only forty-five minutes. Liverpool were lucky to not concede in the second half to an onslaught of attacks; if the first half belonged to Liverpool, Chelsea dominated the second. The ball was mostly in Liverpool’s end, and the Blues managed to sustain pressure on the Liverpool defense. They got their energy back once they adjusted their gameplan; it was more of a tactical miscue than anything.

Which brings me to this point: too often, we see a game and want it to be a piece of a larger storyline. We want a game to define the season we’ve watched so far, to add something further to the dialogue, or to give us insight into our teams. And sometimes, a game defines a team immediately (Manchester City over Arsenal last season, for instance, was a clear indicator of City’s ambitions). Other times, though, a game is simply a game, and a loss is less a symptom of complacency or exhaustion than it is indicative of a tactical miscue that, while easy to identify and fix, simply came too late.

To me, that’s how yesterday’s game was for both sides. Chelsea came out anticipating a match against the Liverpool everyone’s seen all season, only to find a more motivated team waiting for them. Liverpool came out and decided, for the first time this season, to play like they’re a cohesive team, and it worked. Neither of these events are predictive: Chelsea will probably respond by beating someone else tomorrow, while Liverpool are assigned the task of repeating the
“vitality” of this performance against someone else. Out of context, this game means nothing, and the context hasn’t been established yet.

Eventually this game might be looked at as a turning point; today, though, it’s a one-off. Let’s dial back the hyperbole a bit, allow Chelsea to falter without asking them where it all went wrong, and see what ends up happening.