After Stamford Bridge had emptied and the dust settled on arguably the Premier League’s most entertaining game of the season, there emerged amid the wreckage a glimpse of what Chelsea can become under Mauricio Pochettino.
It has not been the smoothest of starts under the club’s Argentinian head coach, yet that result – and the performance that produced it – coming so soon after that bizarre but important victory against high-flying Tottenham Hotspur has offered a gaze into the crystal ball at what could lie ahead.
Chelsea went toe-to-toe with Pep Guardiola’s reigning Treble holders – “for me the best team in the world,” as Pochettino later described them – and earned a deserved point that could easily have been three.
This Chelsea – young, inexperienced, expensively assembled – is still in its infancy but is starting to reflect the Spurs sides that Pochettino repeatedly coached to beat the odds with Premier League title challenges and a Champions League final. Yet where Pochettino overachieved with Spurs, the potential is so much greater at Chelsea to reinstate the west London club as regular trophy winners of the peak Roman Abramovich years for seasons to come.
Pochettino referred to building “from zero” (outsiders may consider starting with a squad costing more than a billion pounds hardly zero) since he arrived at the start of July. All the signs had been pointing to a project that wasn’t working, yet among the inconsistent performances, the defeats to West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Brentford, the 10th place in the Premier League table, there are shoots of the force Chelsea can become. Under Pochettino, they now have eight points against traditional “Big Six” sides – unbeaten by Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham and now City.
How close are they to competing where the club’s owners, the fans and Pochettino expect them to be? “Still far away, like the distance on the table,” Pochettino half-joked after the City game.
The 10 points to Tottenham in fourth does feel like a chasm, but how close can they get to Champions League football this season? There were fingerprints of Pochettino’s great teams everywhere in the draw with City: fast, fun, fearless, executing clever moves, playing incisive, direct football, with passion and mischief.
The darting run from Thiago Silva to the near-post corner of Manchester City’s six-yard box to nod in Conor Gallagher’s corner unmarked to level when you might have expected older iterations of Chelsea under Pochettino to crumble after falling a goal behind.
Enzo Fernandez celebrating a tackle on Phil Foden on half-way in front of his manager like he had won a World Cup final, which he has some experience of.
Cole Palmer slaloming through City’s defence, in the way a young Dele Alli used to under Pochettino at Spurs, with fast feet and quick thinking, only denied a goal by Ederson’s great save. Palmer is only 21 and already has four goals and two assists in his last five games, received his first England call-up on Monday morning after other players withdrew. He could soon represent exceptional value at the £42.5m Chelsea paid Manchester City.
Being unafraid to wind up opponents. Many players nowadays tone down celebrations against former clubs. Not Raheem Sterling, who celebrated his and Chelsea’s four goals as though they were against bitter rivals, not a former employer who had boosted his bank balance by millions of pounds.
Sterling was the centre of everything, energetic, playing with a point to prove. Recently dropped from Gareth Southgate’s England squads, it is of mutual benefit to Sterling and Chelsea for him to spearhead the project.
There is Nicolas Jackson, who is around the same age as Harry Kane when the England striker had that first breakout season in Pochettino’s first at Tottenham, scoring 32 goals in 56 appearances while still an England Under 21 player. There is the mini-revival of Gallagher, who the owners appeared happy to cash in on in the summer but has been one of Pochettino’s leading players.
“We’ve been trying to build slowly but surely,” Sterling said. “There’s been some setbacks. We’re making those steps.”
They took great strides in the space of eight days, the question is how far can it carry them?
