Chelsea's Defensive Struggles Under Alonso
Xabi Alonso’s Chelsea are fast becoming everyone’s favourite attacking watch. They score, they thrill, they swarm forward. And yet, for all the noise around what they do with the ball, the story of this team is increasingly about what happens when they don’t have it.
You can’t stop JP Morgan, they say. Nobody has managed to keep Chelsea from finding the net at least once in every league game this season. But you can’t rely on attacking flair to drag you out of trouble if your back line keeps dragging you into it.
The 2-2 draw with Hull underlined the problem in bold. This was the 20th Premier League match in a row in which Chelsea failed to keep a clean sheet. Twenty. For a club that once built its modern identity on defensive steel, that number stings.
Emi Martinez was supposed to be part of the solution. A World Cup winner, a multiple Yashin Trophy winner, a goalkeeper signed to bring authority and calm. Yet if the players in front of him don’t do the basics, he may as well be Robert Sanchez all over again.
Hull did not slice Chelsea apart with intricate patterns. They didn’t need to. Their 1.32 expected goals told the story of a side given enough encouragement, enough loose moments, enough lapses. Chances arrived not from genius but from generosity.
And that’s the frustration. The potential in this Chelsea attack is obvious, and genuinely exciting. The framework Alonso is building in possession looks modern, aggressive, dangerous. But if he wants to turn that into a title challenge rather than a highlight reel, he has to reach back into his time under Jose Mourinho and hard-wire some cruelty into this defence.
Chelsea can entertain. The next step is learning how to suffocate.
Liverpool Hit Their First Real Wall Under Iraola
Anfield bounced on Wednesday night. Andoni Iraola finally had his first Champions League win as a head coach, against Atletico Madrid no less. That felt inevitable at some point this season. The bigger unknown sat just around the corner.
How would Iraola cope with the grind?
His work at Rayo Vallecano and Bournemouth earned him this chance, but those jobs came without the relentless churn of European football on top of a domestic campaign. This season was always going to ask a harsher question: could his high-energy style survive the schedule?
The 0-0 draw with Fulham offered an early answer, and not the one Liverpool wanted.
From the opening whistle, Liverpool looked a yard short. The usual Iraola tempo never really arrived. They started slowly and never truly broke into the kind of sustained intensity that has already started to define his tenure. Fulham, organised and confident, deserved their first point of the campaign and, at times, looked just as likely to steal all three.
Iraola’s unbeaten run as Liverpool manager rolls on, stretching back to the first week of January when you fold in his Bournemouth surge. But strip away the numbers and the picture blurs. Home games against Nottingham Forest and Fulham have produced only two points. Anfield expects more than that. So does the league table.
Pressed on the issue of fatigue afterwards, Iraola didn’t dodge it.
“In the end, this is the easier one, for me, for you, for everyone - our players were tired. I think there is a lack of freshness, definitely. We cannot hide it,” he admitted. The turnaround, “60-something hours” after a huge Champions League night, was, in his words, “the worst” they will face. Then came the warning: this will happen again, maybe with one extra day, maybe not.
The calendar is not going to soften. The style is not going to water itself down. Somewhere between those two realities, Iraola has to find a way to keep Liverpool running at full speed.
The league will not wait for him to solve it.
Spurs Have Spent Big – But Who Finishes the Chances?
Tottenham’s problem is brutally simple. They don’t score. And if you don’t score, you don’t win.
Another blank in the 0-0 draw with Everton stretched their goalless run in the league to 400 minutes. Four hundred minutes of probing, passing, and ultimately, nothing.
It’s not as if Spurs lack creativity. They are stacked with players who can see and make a pass, and many of them were on the pitch against the Toffees. The issue is what happens at the end of those moves. Or rather, who is at the end of them.
Dominic Solanke is supposed to be that man. For Roberto De Zerbi, he is the only genuine out-and-out No 9 in the squad. When he is fit, he almost has to play. Not because of form, not right now, but because the alternatives don’t look like natural goalscorers.
Yet against Everton, Solanke was a ghost. Whether it was rust from recent setbacks or a deeper problem with rhythm and connection, he never imposed himself. Nineteen touches all game. The goalkeeper, Kinsky, had more.
Spurs have poured millions into reshaping this squad, into giving De Zerbi the tools to build a fluid, attacking side. The patterns are there. The control is there. The final blow is not.
Until someone in a white shirt starts living in the penalty area and finishing the moves this team creates, Tottenham’s season will be defined not by what they spend, or how they play, but by the silence that follows every near miss.
