Tuchel is a manager that likes to tailor his approach based on the opponent, but yeah, generally speaking Chelsea do play nice attacking football under Tuchel.
Im not sure your premise is correct. I’ve seen more than my share of Chelsea games recently, and he plays 1 of 2 ways:
5-2-2-1 or 5-3-2
Spurs First Half: 5-2-2-1, no joy
Spurs Sec Half: 5-3-2, dominated
Next game, City.
Played Spurs Second Half until 60 mins, then Spurs First Half for 10 mins, then doubled down on Spurs First Half with RLC coming on to leave just 1 DM.
The problem he faced at Spurs was that NES dominated the midfield, which led to little action for his front 3 (2-1). He then set out to dominate the midfield, got hold of it, then released Kante to play double duty, as RM and the right sided inside forward.
Today, we didn’t allow your midfield 3 any time on the ball, and when the ball was coming out from your back 5, it was often a poor quality ball because it was played under pressure from our front 3/4.
One of the problems we face with the high press is that we commit FOUR players to it, so it has to be pretty good at creating a poor ball forward, or we can get caught a man short in midfield. Today, Rodri and Bernardo covered the middle zonally, with the CBs coming forward onto the ball to snuff out even the long balls up the middle. Another thing that helped was our FBs didn’t play as RM/LM too often.
Yes, Lukaku is a handful and will score a hatful this season, so he takes some manhandling, and both CBs got a yellow for fouls on him. But, he had the least touches of any player on the park today! 21 touches in 90 minutes, or less than 1 touch every FOUR minutes. Considering some of those occasions were multiple touches, it means he wasn’t even touching ball for periods of 5-10 minutes.
I called it a Total Football performance from City today and I think even the most casual observer would have said the scoreline flattered Chelsea. I don’t know what the xG numbers were today, but even 3-0 would have been more than fair today.
Tuchel is a good coach and he has an excellent squad of players to play the two formations he prefers. I think the only negative is that I think you only have a 16 man team at most, whereas I think City are more of a 20 man team.
Hopefully, that will keep us fresh and on our toes, because we played ONE GAME LESS than the maximum possible last season, with only the FA Cup Final eluding us! Thankfully, like Chelsea, we have an outstanding cadre of Academy talent knocking on the door looking for a Cup opportunity, and possibly even a few PL cameos. That bodes well for both teams!
We could be going at this for quite a few seasons to come, as I think the current Top 4 will continue to pull away from the satellite teams (Spurs, Arsenal, Everton, West Ham, Leicester).
Accordingly, I look forward to many more ding dong battles with Chelsea. Too bad I hate a few of your players (Azpi, Rudi & Jorgi) with a passion! Dirty, sly, cheating little fuckers, all three of them!
It’s going to be a long, interesting season!