Chelsea FC’s Reinvention Under Antonio Conte: Three Backs, Lots of Goals & a Happy Hazard

On the 25th of September, Chelsea Football Club was in a bit of a bother. A clinical start to the season, featuring 89th and 87th minute Diego Costa winners over West Ham and Watford, had been undone by some horrible defensive mistakes in a 2-2 draw with Swansea and a relatively comfortable 2-1 defeat against Liverpool. But it was the 3-0 hiding at the hands of Arsenal that really threw things into despair. It was all over by the end of the first half as the Gunners methodically picked holes in the Chelsea defensive line, dragging guys out and sliding the ball through the space created. It was every bit as comprehensive as the score suggests.

Since then they’ve strung together a five match winning streak in the Premier League, shooting their way into second place at the November international window, scoring 16 goals and not conceding a single one in the process. Yeah, that really happened.

The easy answer to the question of what the hell happened is that Conte switched up to a 3-4-3 formation. Simple as that, really. Conte has always used three at the back, a very specific three of Andrea Barzagli, Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini – that trio bringing him so much success with Juventus and a decent bit with Italy too.

So it always felt like a matter of time before he unleashed that formation with Chelsea. Given a shorter pre-season, perhaps Conte didn’t think the team were ready to pull it off in games, probably for a couple reasons. One being that the heart and soul of that defence is John Terry and he frankly can’t kick it in a back trio. There’s a lot more proactive movement involved there. With his utter lack of pace (he was never fast in the first place), you couldn’t really see him pushing out to the sidelines as Gary Cahill and Cesar Azpilicueta tend to do, stretching the field and allowing the wing backs to gun it forward. Nor does he have anything like the ability on the ball to play the borderline deep midfield role that David Luiz has done so well. Holy crap, more on that fuzzy bugger later.

Marginalising Terry is one thing. Another is that there was nobody to take his place. Luiz didn’t re-join the club until the end of the transfer window while Kurt Zouma is on his way back from a broken leg. Ola Aina is about the only young defender not out on loan and until they signed Marcos Alonso they also didn’t have an ideal left wing back – not if Azpilicueta was being eyed up as a central option, which wasn’t always expected but as so often happens with these things as soon as he first lined up there it all made perfect sense.

Potentially, Antonio Conte didn’t even want to switch to Plan A when he did, but that Arsenal defeat had shattered the last remnants of what they call the Honeymoon Period. Suddenly it was time to get down to business before things sunk any deeper.

Yeah, turns out they were more than ready. Beginning with a 2-0 win away at Hull, an ideal opportunity to try a few things against a team that’d sit back and just generally not be very good. Then, after an international break, they thumped Leicester 3-0 at home and the following week came the triumphant 4-0 win over Man United. A 2-0 victory at Southampton kept up the trend and they a thorough 5-0 demolition of Everton has truly confirmed them.

Here’s the shape, the team that started against Everton and which has been pretty much consistent across the last five Premier League games, with Thibaut Courtois in goal naturally. Willian started in Pedro’s spot against Hull but left the squad soon after with his mother sadly passing away and the harsh thing about football is that sometimes that’s how it works. Pedro came in and has played the best football he has in his time with Chelsea and Willian’s returned to play off the bench.

You’ve got the defensive three, which will play a high line that covers as far across the field as possible when on the ball. The leaves a lot of room between them but that’s what you have the two man midfield for, staggered between them and if you wanna know why Cesc Fabregas isn’t getting into this team, that’s why. Kante and Matic are both very defensive minded players. They aren’t really there to be creative, they’re there to win the ball and get it to that front three. Kante is especially perfect for that role.

As we saw at the Euros with Conte’s Italy, the wing backs are the key to a lot of this. It’s their role to push forward as wingers when Chelsea are on attack and then also to sit back when the team is on defence. There’s a lot of cover around them that eases a few of the defensive pressures but they still have to get up and down that line. Manchester United tried to counter that with Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard on the sides, two of their fastest wingers, hoping to capitalise on any space left in behind. Jose Mourinho probably should’ve used Anthony Martial, but the Frenchman had only returned from injury a few days earlier, where he played 90 minutes in the Europa League. Safe to say Jose didn’t balance that one too well.

Anyway, that’s a valid strategy against this Chelsea team but it does depend on you being able to trap those WBs up top, hitting them on the counter. Chelsea took the lead after less than a minute and added another within half an hour. They never had to take any dumb risks.

Victor Moses and Marcos Alonso are each averaging more than a shot per game. Moses has two goals and an assist, Alonso has one goal and an assist (one of Moses’ goals came earlier in the season playing as a forward off the bench). Alonso is also making 4 tackles a game with 1.8 interceptions. Moses’ numbers are much lower but they’re skewed by the early season where he played further forward.

And then we come to the attacking trio. Remember Mourinho getting snappy at Hazard for not doing his defensive duties? Well the beauty of this system is that the width and defence from the flanks is supplied by the wing backs so Hazard has a free licence to do amazing things. He’s dribbling more, he’s cutting inside towards goal, he’s sliding into shooting positions and he’s linking with other players, all with a more fluid role. Alonso is more of a traditional wing back down his side which means Hazard has a creative freedom that Pedro doesn’t have as much down the right though Moses also offers extra attacking weaponry. The dynamics between conservative and expressive are kinda switched on either side. No worries there, Hazard is the man you want to unleash. He’s a completely different player this season, all the way back to his majestic 2014-15 form that won him the PFA Player of the Year award. He scored six goals in 43 games all of last season. He’s already topped that.

The team statistics haven’t really changed much. 16.7 shots per game before the new formation and 17.2 after. 8.7 shots against beforehand and 8.0 since. Some of that will be down to the fact they started their season with games against West Ham, Watford and Burnley, while in the last month we’ve seen them maintain a steady goal threat against three teams in European competition and another in the hunt. Plus it’s a small sample size. Still, they’ve also dropped from 57.1% to 52.6% in terms of average possession. Interesting, that one. Even in losses to Liverpool and Arsenal they still narrowly shaded the ball yet against Southampton they only had 45% and vs Man United it was a dash under 44%.

That’s one big difference between that Chelsea team and this Chelsea team. They’re arguably equally as dangerous playing with the ball and building up their attacks as they are hitting you quickly on the break. Here’s one against Everton, Eden Hazard’s first goal where Gareth Barry is dispossessed by Matic. Costa passes to Hazard, he cuts past two defenders with a simple turn and fires inside the far post.

And now Hazard’s second goal, which comes at the end of a 23 pass move full of searching balls and testing player movement.

God, that’s frightening… and this is without even mentioning that Diego Costa has stopped getting (as many) stupid yellows and is leading the Premier League scoring charts with 9 of them. The guy looks like he’s channelling his energy in all the right ways, working so much harder than he ever did last season. The difference is almost as immense as the one we’re seeing in Hazard.

And don’t discount that effect either. This season Chelsea cover a significant amount more ground on the park and Moses and Alonso are chief among them with roughly 11km per game travelled. Eden Hazard’s been released from man marking duties but that doesn’t mean he’s slacking off. The whole team is enthusiastic and engaged and it all flows on from a manager who knows how to get a team to buy into what he’s selling.

What was the claim of Mourinho before he was sacked? That there were rats in the dressing room, deliberately undermining him. Antonio Conte only needed one game before he won over the fans with his impassioned sideline antics and by that measure he probably had the players on board long before that. With that squad in emotional chaos 12 months ago, don’t also sleep on the impact of Guus Hiddink as caretaker boss. He planted the seeds of happiness, he got them enjoying their football once again. Hard to see Conte getting this response, given how demanding he is, following straight on from Mourinho. It’s like recharging the batteries.

Thus we come to David Luiz.

A subject of mass ridicule on so many occasions, a player once described as playing like he’s being controlled by a kid on his playstation. They made big bucks in selling him to PSG and then went about buying him back this summer, right at the end of the transfer window. The feeling initially was: Huh!? The next feeling was: I guess they ran out of time and couldn’t sign any of their main targets.

That might be true, but Luiz has come in and he’s been… well, brilliant. Playing as the central defender in the back three, he is the leader and the organiser which is a role he’s really embraced and he’s also got the room, now and then, to step forward into the midfield and indulge those maverick tendencies of his without such a risk. He’s got what the Italians call a ‘libero’ role, which sort of means a liberated sweeper.

In the past Luiz has tried too hard to get involved and influence a game, often at the expense of kinda crucial aspects… like positioning, for example. He doesn’t have to do that in Conte’s system. Luiz now acts as the first phase of possession. He begins their moves, travelling up or down the pitch to find the right angles for the pass and then setting them up from there. When things break down up the pitch, they move it back to him and he starts it again – see that 23-pass Hazard goal where they do the exact same thing. It’s almost like how a holding midfielder like Michael Carrick does things.

And when you look at what David Luiz does best, it all suits that stuff. He’s way over-skilled for a defender, physically strong and fit, very tall as well. He’s only had one unsuccessful touch in 630 minutes of Premier League footy, something that only Ashley Williams, Curtis Davies, Jan Vertonghen, Steve Cook and Oriel Romeu can match in as many minutes or more (excluding goalkeepers). And Davies and Cook aren’t defenders who find themselves on the ball all that much. Williams and Vertonghen are two top class defenders themselves while Romeu is a midfielder which makes that stat amazing until you see he’s been tackled 11 times.

It’s pretty much the perfect position for Ol’ Sideshow Bob. He’s always involved in some way or another and both Chelsea and Brazil fans will tell you that if Luiz is in your team, you want him to be having an influence, no doubt about it. The dude can do things that few others can out of central defence, it’s just a matter of – like Hazard, like Costa – making sure he’s putting his energies into doing the right things. He’s not having to play focussed, sustained defence here. He’s a ball player right up until there’s a guy running at him, or a cross coming in from the side, or a shot fired in towards him that he can block. The hero stuff which he loves doing.

Against Everton, Robert Koeman made the mistake of trying to play a balanced game with three at the back himself. It’s not a new trick for his Everton side, he’s tried it before, but it was a major failure here. Early on, Chelsea found themselves with a lot of the ball, keeping Everton pegged back and that meant Brian Oviedo and Seamus Coleman were stuck defending almost in a back five. They kept the Blues out but at the expense of being able to string anything together themselves – Everton didn’t have a single shot in the first half. But when Oviedo and Coleman did travel forwards, they were exposed by the fact that Everton’s midfield couldn’t hold the ball and every time they turned it over they had speed coming at them from Hazard and Pedro, with Costa the fulcrum in the middle. Hazard scored that goal and then Alonso added another a minute later. Oviedo was replaced in the 36th minute with a change to 4-3-3 but the heart had already been ripped out by a rampant, ruthless and above all entertaining Chelsea team.

Eleven games in, there’s plenty of time for this to all change and there are plenty of reasons why it might do exactly that. There’s a lot of depth among the creative players but while they can easily bring in Oscar or Willian or Chalobah to replace Pedro, none of the rest of them can do what Hazard does. Similarly, Michy Batshuayi is a soft replacement for Costa at this stage, being young and new to the league. N’Golo Kante is famously irreplaceable though they might be able to roll with that punch if they had to, for a couple games of Fabregas or Loftus-Cheek or whatever. There’s bugger all cover at the back though. An injury to Alonso or Moses would be very challenging. Their reserve defenders, John Terry and Branislav Ivanovic, don’t seem to have a place within this 3-4-3 formation either – hey, there’s always collateral damage.

Plus there’s the question of whether they can sustain this level of effort over a full season. It’ll be a fascinating one, because we’ve seen Spurs put a huge emphasis on physical fitness and commitment under Mauricio Pochettino but they’ve also faded towards the end of seasons. This time we have both Antonio Conte’s Chelsea and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool doing the same thing by stressing the need to work harder and cover more turf than the opposition and they’re the two form teams at this moment. Safe to say the jury’s still out on this case.

In the meantime…

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Written by Nick Robinson On Tagged