Chelsea's protracted transfer of Moises Caicdeo has finally concluded for a reported £115m. While his abilities are obvious, in Enzo Fernandez's performance against Liverpool we might already have had a glimpse of what could be the strongest midfield pairing in the Premier League.
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00:00 Hello there everybody, Adam Cleary, 442, the Premier League is back, life is worth living.
00:09 Now just full disclosure, I had already decided that today's video was going to be on the
00:13 winning team from the Chelsea vs Liverpool game, but of course that was a draw wasn't
00:18 it?
00:19 Sort of, quite annoying.
00:20 But thankfully though it did raise another very good issue and that is that if you weren't
00:24 already sure why both of these teams were willing to pay the GDP of a small nation to
00:29 sign Moises Caicedo, then after that game, you should be.
00:34 Basically it is my genuinely held opinion that whichever of these two teams was able
00:38 to get Caicedo would then immediately become a genuine contender for the Premier League
00:42 title and, well, he's going to Chelsea, so...
00:48 We did actually do a full video breakdown on Caicedo like a month ago before all this
00:53 absolute nonsense started with him, so you can watch that, I'll link it everywhere, but
00:58 in the context of the game yesterday, there was lots to learn.
01:02 The main conclusion we drew from that video though was that players like him cost so much
01:06 money even with such relatively little Premier League experience because they don't come
01:11 along very often, he has a very particular set of skills that makes him not just valuable
01:16 but rare.
01:17 I don't know if people still say TLDR but the TLDR version of that is while Liverpool
01:21 and Chelsea both have loads of players that can go and win those kind of games, it's very
01:26 difficult for them to get a player that allows them to control those kind of games.
01:30 And that's why that game was so end-to-end and back and forth and swung one way and then
01:35 the other and while there was loads of chances and everybody was making things happen but
01:38 nobody ever really felt like they were in total control of it.
01:42 But here is the thing, and the reason this was such an exciting result for Chelsea was
01:46 that while, yeah, they didn't ever feel in total control of it, I would argue they looked
01:50 much the better side, they looked far more likely to go and win it.
01:53 Or at least they did after Pochettino made a very particular tactical tweak in the first
01:57 half and they then went and got their equaliser.
02:00 And it's in that specific tactical tweak that I think there was a major, major clue as to
02:05 why they can do really big things this season.
02:08 And that clue, my friends, is 1) Enzo Fernandes.
02:11 Alright, so I think everybody and his dog, and by that I mean me and my me, thought that
02:16 Pochettino would set Chelsea up in kind of a 4-2-3-1.
02:19 We'd seen it a bit in pre-season, they've got kind of the right players for it, they've
02:23 got really exciting attackers, Jackson's really good there, they can find players for the
02:27 pivot, and the back four sort of suits that.
02:29 But he didn't do that, did he?
02:30 And in actual fact, they set up with a back three.
02:33 It wound up being a little bit something like this.
02:35 Jackson led the line really well, we had Fernandes and Gallagher as a double pivot in the middle,
02:40 and the two wide attackers, they kept going in nice and narrow to allow the wing-backs
02:43 to push up as high as they could.
02:45 And this was the build-up shape that Chelsea were going for, because if you think, if you've
02:47 got these two players here combined with that double pivot, that sort of nullifies the box
02:52 that Liverpool are trying to do, while creating loads of space for overlaps in the wide area.
02:56 It's probably a really, really sensible way to play against Klopp at the minute.
02:59 But the problem with it was, and the reason it just flatly didn't work in those first
03:03 20 minutes, was Liverpool were so incredibly narrow, it killed any build-up that these
03:07 three were trying to do.
03:09 So when Chelsea were building out from the back, you had Salah, Jota and Diaz all moving
03:12 straight onto the centre-backs, and then because they don't have a natural defensive midfielder,
03:17 all three of their players in that position were equally as narrow, and just smothering
03:21 both Fernandes and Gallagher.
03:23 If they brought the full-backs a little bit nearer in to try and sort of build out that
03:26 way, then Liverpool would simply just shuffle across one and still overload those areas
03:30 of the pitch.
03:31 And it might not seem like it, but this is genuinely all about Fernandes.
03:35 Like he is one of the most dynamic, exciting, just vibrant midfielders in the Premier League.
03:40 And he did show it in fits and starts last season, but one of the major problems he had
03:44 at Chelsea was he was having to play so deep to be so important to their build-up, he couldn't
03:49 impact the game further up the pitch.
03:51 And I earnestly believe the reason Potts was going with this system with three defenders
03:54 at the back was effectively like a Caicedo stopgap.
03:58 So they would still have three players in this area that could do the build-up, but
04:02 they wouldn't require Fernandes to drop in and help.
04:04 If we just take Liverpool out of the equation for a second here, what they wanted to happen
04:08 was for Silva to move into this sort of area, because he's got a great range of passing
04:11 as well, then you get a nice little triangle going with the two other centre-backs and
04:15 the goalkeeper, because of course they've got Sanchez now, and he's dead good with
04:17 the ball at his feet.
04:18 This would mean that Gallagher was then free to get between the lines, find space, the
04:22 thing he's really good at, and Fernandes could receive the ball pretty much anywhere.
04:25 And if he did have to drop back to receive it, he was still doing that about 20 yards
04:29 further up the pitch than he would have been doing last season, meaning he could then drive
04:32 with it and use his dribbling ability.
04:34 But of course, as we've discussed, Liverpool just absolutely smothered this plan and it
04:39 never really got going.
04:40 Now Pochettino's solution to this was incredibly clever.
04:42 He just allowed Ben Chilwell to play up as high as he wanted, and he shuffled this back
04:46 three into a back four with Rhys James basically using his engine to play as a traditional
04:51 right back, but also get up whenever he could.
04:53 And it worked really well.
04:54 Liverpool didn't really know what to do with it.
04:55 Salah stuck with Caldwell, so he's all the way over on this side now.
04:58 Jottis stuck with Silva, so he's all the way on that side now.
05:01 And all of a sudden, Diaz isn't sure whether he should be with Diazy or he should be with
05:05 James.
05:06 If he stuck in the middle, it allowed James to push forward and get overlaps going with
05:09 Raheem Sterling, but when he pushed across to him, that then meant that the rest of the
05:12 midfield had to move around and this allowed Chilwell to receive the ball in a lot more
05:16 space.
05:17 But the really, really clever part about it is it then enables one of these two midfielders
05:21 to drop, knowing that Liverpool won't push that high up and commit an extra player forward
05:25 there.
05:26 One of them can drop into that space and all of a sudden they can do the triangle with
05:30 the ability to then get through the line.
05:32 You've shuffled Liverpool around in a way that allows you to do that.
05:35 Now think about it.
05:36 You're Mauricio Pochettino.
05:38 You now have a circumstance where you can put a really good player, someone who's good
05:41 on the ball, who can make things happen, who can beat a press, who's really, really good
05:45 in that area.
05:46 You can put one of Fernandes and Gallagher here.
05:49 What do you do?
05:50 Common sense says you put Fernandes there.
05:52 So he was playing last season and yeah, he's not the best use of him, but he is really,
05:56 really good at that.
05:57 And then you just have Gallagher run around and try and find space and do his thing.
06:00 But no, he did not do that.
06:03 He refused to put Fernandes in a deep area.
06:08 Instead, Gallagher went and sat there, which is not his thing at all.
06:12 He's not a player that suits that role particularly well.
06:14 He's great off the ball and he runs and he collects it and he's dangerous in the final
06:18 third.
06:19 But he does just about have the sort of game IQ and just the drive and the determination
06:26 to not let you down.
06:27 And that's an enormous risk by Pochettino, by the way.
06:31 Like if he wasn't reading the game properly, Liverpool would pass around him.
06:33 If he was too weak in the tackle, Liverpool would just play through him.
06:36 It could have absolutely swamped him.
06:38 He could have just got bored and wandered up the pitch as his natural footballing instincts
06:42 would have told him to do.
06:43 But he did a really, really good job there.
06:46 Chelsea stopped going as narrow to effectively sort of stretch Liverpool's back line a bit.
06:49 And that meant that whichever midfielder then got drawn to Gallagher because somebody had
06:53 to go with him, Fernandes would then just move into the space on that side and was receiving
06:57 the ball behind Liverpool's midfield repeatedly.
07:01 And he became almost immediately Chelsea's most dangerous player.
07:05 No goals or no assists to show for it.
07:07 But if you watch the game, it was all going through him.
07:10 The times that Chelsea were able to get on top of this game was the times where they
07:13 weren't able to live with Fernandes.
07:15 And honestly, if you've only watched Fernandes in the Premier League, I cannot tell you how
07:19 much better he is in this part of the pitch than he is in this part.
07:23 Like if we compare his FB ref profiles from the first half of last season when he was
07:27 playing for Benfica and the second half of last season when he's playing for Chelsea,
07:31 like look at this, his passing numbers, they're amazing.
07:33 They stayed consistent.
07:34 He made the adaptation to the Premier League absolutely seamlessly.
07:38 But the one major difference between these numbers is in where he was doing this.
07:42 The drop off between the number of touches he is having per game in the attacking portions
07:47 of the pitch when he moves to Chelsea is absolutely glaring.
07:50 Like clearly, this is a player who at his most comfortable wants to be getting involved
07:55 in these areas of the pitch.
07:56 Like for a player who was effectively sitting as a double pivot, so a deep position, that's
08:00 a huge number to be having here.
08:02 That drops right off when he moves to the Premier League.
08:05 His carries tell a similar story as well.
08:07 He was not daunted by the change to the Premier League.
08:09 He's still doing it as often and doing it as far, but just the amount of times he's
08:13 able to do that in dangerous areas also drops right off.
08:17 Like yes, granted, spending like 800 bajillion quid is obviously going to improve Chelsea
08:22 as a team, but Pochettino's real job, if we're honest, was to get in there, identify which
08:27 players were just never going to work out and get rid of them, and then work out which
08:30 players still had something to give, which players had not shown the best of themselves
08:35 in a Chelsea shirt, and get that out of them.
08:38 And I would argue, next to only Mudrick, Enzo Fernandes is the one player who can have the
08:43 biggest possible step up in terms of contribution for Chelsea this season.
08:47 And I think it's pretty obvious that Pochettino agrees with that for three fairly glaring reasons.
08:53 First of all, they clearly came up with a system, possibly just for this game, that
08:56 was going to allow Fernandes to not get bogged down in the build up and do his work in this
09:01 area of the pitch.
09:02 Secondly, when that system clearly didn't work and he should have thrown him into a
09:06 deep area, he put a far less suitable player in instead because he felt the reward of having
09:11 him further up was worth that risk.
09:13 And three, they're going to spend 115 million quid on Moises Caicedo, arguably the most
09:21 perfect player in the Premier League to play this role.
09:23 And I don't want to go over the ground from the other video too much, but he absolutely
09:28 is if Chelsea are going to play with four at the back.
09:29 He is probably the one player in the Premier League after Rodri you would want to have
09:34 to drop in, to receive the ball, to be involved in that build up, to beat a press, to go past
09:39 players, to do these first phases while you've got another midfielder who can then push on
09:44 as a result.
09:45 Fernandes found himself in that role repeatedly last year because Chelsea did not have another
09:50 tool in their box that they, because he was by far and away the best player at Chelsea
09:54 to do it.
09:55 But while that was good for the system, it wasn't good for him.
09:58 So now you go and get a player who is good for the system and you just play with the
10:03 box of attacking toys that is Enzo Fernandes.
10:07 You signed him in the first place so he could do things like this.
10:10 The fact that he spent six months in a far more physically demanding league doing a far
10:15 less fun job I think says absolutely loads about the calibre of the player they actually
10:20 have on their hands here.
10:21 Now okay, if you're not a Chelsea fan you might have found the start of that video saying
10:24 that genuine title contenders is a bit of a reach and okay there's still a couple of
10:29 question marks at the back.
10:30 Surely Thiago Silva can't keep playing this well for this long at that age, that silly
10:34 and are the goals going to flow as easily as they did in pre-season?
10:38 All valid points, sure.
10:41 But championships are decided.
10:43 They live and die, honestly, by your midfield, I think.
10:47 And of all the teams in the Premier League who will be playing at two this season, I
10:51 genuinely cannot think of a better possible pairing than Enzo Fernandes and Moises Caicedo.
10:57 I'm not saying they've got the best midfield in the Premier League, I'm not saying that,
11:01 but I think for the system they're going to play, I just think it's going to be so, so
11:05 effective against so many teams.
11:07 Don't get me wrong, a statement win over Liverpool would have been very convenient for the purposes
11:11 of this video, but they didn't get that.
11:13 But I think anybody with either eyes or a brain will have watched that game and think
11:17 that this Chelsea look night and day compared to what a shambles they were last season,
11:22 which again, got to give Pochettino credit there.
11:25 He's turned that around or at least started to turn it around very quickly.
11:28 Anyway, just my opinion, isn't it?
11:31 Would love to hear yours in the comments below as ever.
11:33 And of course, you want to continue the conversation, I'm on Twitter.
11:36 I don't do much else other than just think about football, so you might as well help.
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11:57 Until next time, though, thank you very much for watching.
11:58 I'm away to go put a speculative £10 on Chelsea to win the league because I'm just very irresponsible
12:04 with money and yeah, I'll see you soon.