Chelsea and Aston Villa Are Two Ships Passing in the Night

Except one of them blasted a hole in the other's hull on Sunday.

This is a new series from The Football Weekend covering one great match from the past weekend in your inbox every Monday morning.

“Families are always rising and falling in America,” Hawthorne and Billy Costigan said, and the same goes for football clubs in England. Chelsea rose to perennial contention on the wings of Roman Abramovich’s money in the early 2000s, competing for league titles pretty consistently through 2017. But even before the oligarch was sent packing following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Blues lost just a bit of their ferocity, and then there was the disastrous plunge after Todd Boehly and Co. took the reins.

By 2022/23, they’d finished 12th on 44 points. The inherited policy of constantly hiring and firing managers began to look less ruthlessly effective, like it had under Abramovich, and more desperate and deranged. The Chelsea lions were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

But beginning last season, they did begin to get one or two things right, and Mauricio Pochettino weathered a rough start to secure 63 points by season’s end, good enough for sixth. It wasn’t good enough for him to stick around, however, and things looked a bit chaotic once again. Enzo Maresca had the whiff of a panic appointment in that context, but look at him now. A third of the way through the season, Chelsea are third in the league, behind Arsenal only alphabetically. (The two London outfits are dead even on points, goal difference, and goals scored.) The Blues are on the rise again.

And they got here—in part—by bludgeoning Aston Villa at Stamford Bridge on Sunday. Nicolas Jackson smacked a bouncing cross in off the post on seven minutes, Enzo Fernández welcomed in a Cole Palmer slide-pass at the top of the box and speared in a second, then Palmer took up a similar position and used a couple of defenders as a screen to arrow in a third with a deft swing of his left boot. By the time it hit the top left corner, the game was cooked. Chelsea were rampant until the final whistle and could have had five or six.

All the while, Aston Villa were falling apart. Last season’s supermarksman Ollie Watkins missed a golden chance in the first half, Pau Torres gifted the opposition a free kick in the box with what the referee (contentiously) ruled was a backpass to goalkeeper Emi Martínez, then Martínez executed an insane giveaway of possession in his own box but somehow avoided punishment. Then he went off injured. Villa looked legless in midfield, overrun, devoid of ideas, and they lacked conviction in both boxes. The physical and mental tax of adding Champions League football to the calendar seems to be breaking Unai Emery’s side in much the same way it did Newcastle last season. They don’t have the squad, or perhaps Emery doesn’t have the wherewithal, to cope.

The sum effect is that Villa appear to be a Premier League family whose fortunes are falling. All those wonderful moments last season, the decisive defeats of title-chasers Arsenal and Man City, even the glowing moments in Europe this term are no longer looking like the beginning of a new era, one where the Villans play their way into regular Top Six membership—a seat at the big boys’ table. There’s growing risk now that it was all more like a wild and exotic holiday that’s coming to an end. Time to go to back to the office in the morning.

The office, at this point, is the bottom half of the Premier League. Aston Villa are 12th and sinking, though their fate could change quickly if they can get themselves together, get some control in midfield, put together a few clean sheets, and finish off their chances. Incredibly, just four points separate them from Brighton in that fourth and final Champions League spot. It’s an unusual English league season already, and there’s two thirds of it left to play.

———————————

BONUS COVERAGE:

LIVERPOOL 2-0 MAN CITY

One might expect the biggest match of the Premier League season so far to get the Lead Story treatment, but it’s a sign of the times for Manchester City that they struggled to even make this game competitive. Liverpool completely battered them, particularly in the first half, though in a different way from Tottenham last week. The scoreline was ultimately more modest, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a match over the last decade where City were more comprehensively shut out of the midfield game than they were at Anfield. They were routed. It was Arne Slot’s Austerlitz.

The Dutchman got his team selection and his tactics exactly right, while for Pep Guardiola it was something like his Waterloo. Bernardo Silva, İlkay Gündoğan, and Rico Lewis were simply too lightweight to deal with the physicality, hard running, and tidy passing work of Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch, and Alexis Mac Allister. Even with Manuel Akanji flitting in to join the Citizen midfielders from the back four, they were losing duels and chasing shadows.

In the second half, Liverpool were happy to cede some ground in the middle third and retreat to their castle, where their shape was so good you hardly noticed Ibrahima Konaté was missing in the heart of defense. Joe Gomez was good enough, Virgil Van Dijk was fantastic apart from one moment of madness that went unpunished, and Andy Robertson rolled back the years to bomb down the lefthand side. His old partner-in-crime, Trent Alexander-Arnold, played a few scything balls across 60 yards or more, the best of the bunch a long ball in behind for Mo Salah that faded from inside to out like a golf shot, beguiling a City defender. It was one of a million times that Liverpool went scampering into the acres of space behind the Sky Blue rearguard, sniffing out their lack of pace on the turn and sparking chaotic retreats. At times in that first half, City looked like they were running through molasses.

It was the best of the Jürgen Klopp heavy-metal stuff bottled for more managed consumption, with an ABV label or at least a message from the missus that you’d better be home by 11. If Slot can maintain that intensity and that cutting edge while introducing spells of calm control, as he did here, maybe Liverpool really will win the league.⚽︎