Simple Plan
By the standard of their first league meeting last season, yesterday’s encounter at Stamford Bridge was not as good an advertisement for Conte vs Guardiola as the Premier League’s definitive managerial duel.
Instead, it showed off just how much City have improved as a collective (and also, as some will churlishly point out, in terms of personnel), and how much less lucid Antonio Conte is, in terms of setting up his side.
One of football’s great polarizers is the concept of the ‘Plan B’. By this, it is often meant playing in a different way based upon circumstance. However, this is something of a myth (at least in the sense it is commonly used), perhaps reinforced by Football Manager; coaches cannot simply change their tactical thinking between games. It’s hard enough to prepare at the top level, with games often every three days, without seeking to change tactics (this refers to the tenets of the team’s overall playing style, not just positional notation, of course). They take time to prepare, you know…
Anyway, Conte has a bit of a Plan B dilemma just now. This season, he has attempted to move away from the 3–4–3 shape with which Chelsea swept all before them last season (including Guardiola’s City, twice) and embrace a 3–5–1–1. There are a couple of reasons for this, but increasingly it had begun to feel like teams had worked out the old shape, and there was a tendency to get overrun in midfield — he’s great and all, but N’Golo Kante isn’t really two players.
The jury is out on its effectiveness. It allowed Chelsea exert control over Atletico in the Champions League, providing a framework for greater intensity (Kante+Bakayoko) and distribution (Fabregas) in the same midfield. However, what gave Conte the upper hand against Guardiola (and everyone else, really) last season was that it was the Italian who posed the challenge, and challenged others to react. Guardiola can often push into self-harm when forced to respond to a peculiar challenge, and will sometimes straddle the line between bravery and suicide.
His decision to face Chelsea with a back three last season, effectively matching three on three against Costa, Hazard and Willian, was great until it wasn’t, for example.
However, this time, it is Conte who does not seem to know his best shape. The conviction of the 3–4–3 and the drill sergeant nature of the former Juventus boss meant that Chelsea wagered all on their own ability to execute the system flawlessly, something they did for the most part last term. Has that belief been lost altogether?
Interestingly, it is not solely in terms of shape that Conte’s Plan B seems to be creating more problems than it solves.
When Alvaro Morata trudged off last night, the agitation on Conte’s face was plain. That he opted to bring on Willian rather than Michy Batshuayi, who had scored the winner in midweek in Madrid, was telling, and entirely understandable.
The paradox with having a back-up striker is that you want someone who is different enough to the main guy that he can be an option, but also someone who is similar enough that he can be a replacement. This is important for a team like Conte’s Chelsea, which relies on what Eden Hazard calls ‘automatisms’ — basically set, synchronous patterns of play and movement that eliminate the time required for thought.
A back-up striker that cannot replicate the movements of the first-choice ruins the entire dynamic of the team, and unless Conte is required to teach his side a different set of movements just for the eventuality that Batshuayi is needed in a game, playing him is pretty much ineffective.
He would eventually come on, but his introduction seemed more perfunctory than anything, and his performance showed as much. One might argue that Conte’s initial vote of no confidence was to blame for his ineffectiveness upon coming on, but to some, such a perceived slight might have been considered an opportunity to prove the manager wrong.
This is not to knock Batshuayi’s ability at all, but increasingly the sense is that he is a good striker, but just not the right type for this Chelsea side.
The tantalizing question then is: just different should an effective Plan B be from Plan A in order to retain effectiveness?
