Sancho slipping into familiar Man Utd groove at Chelsea amid empty Maresca threats
Jadon Sancho did nothing again for Chelsea and Enzo Maresca’s threats are now empty after his side were knocked out of the FA Cup by Brighton.
It feels like we’ve been waiting a long time for Jadon Sancho to do something for Chelsea. Time after time here we watched him collect the ball in favourable positions, often with just Joel Veltman – who was booked midway through the first half – to beat, chop back and play the easy pass to Marc Cucurella or one of the midfielders, before failing to offer the option of a one-two, instead standing still to wait for a return pass of no consequence to Brighton. For a supposedly dynamic, dribbling menace he doesn’t half slow the game down.
That was a criticism frequently aimed his way at Manchester United, and after a very promising start to his Chelsea career he appears to be slipping worryingly into that lethargic groove he then failed to escape from at Old Trafford.
He got an assist in each of his first three Chelsea appearances, with his zenith in blue undoubtedly the comeback win over Tottenham at the start of December, when he scored a brilliant goal and delivered eight shot-creating actions. He created six chances in the next game vs Brentford, but has managed just 11 in the eight games since.
After his brilliant performance against Tottenham, which gave Chelsea fans what currently looks like false hope that they had landed the Borussia Dortmund version of Sancho for a snip from United, Maresca fired a warning the winger’s way, as he’s done after any standout display from one of his players this season in a bid to avoid them getting ideas above their stations.
“I said since the start that the reason why Jadon came here is because we think that Jadon is going to help us,” Maresca explained. “The only thing he has to do is to continue in the same way. He cannot drop, otherwise he’s not going to play.”
Mykhaylo Mudryk was still available for selection back then, as was Joao Felix, while Christopher Nkunku was a genuine option rather than someone biding his time before Bayern Munich can find the funds to buy him, with Sancho’s dip in performance levels coinciding with increasingly limited options to replace him on the left wing to the point where Maresca’s threat of dropping him has been rendered almost entirely empty.
He had no shots and completed none of his three attempted dribbles, and was hooked in favour of teenage academy graduate Tyrique George with 15 minutes to play with Chelsea chasing the game after goals from Georginio Rutter and Kaoru Mitoma followed Bart Verbruggen’s early mistake to give Chelsea the lead.
The last straw for Maresca came when Pedro Neto dashed down the right and pulled the ball back to Sancho, only for him to take a poor touch which should have been a first-time shot, a second further away from goal and a third to cede possession.
As has so often been the case with Sancho recently it was a moment that won’t go down as a chance, be included in a highlights package or even be registered as a moment of note, but a more effective forward – and we would put an in-form Sancho firmly in that category – makes something of that opportunity, rather than leaving us all feeling unfulfilled.
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And that’s Sancho to a tee right now: frustrating; unsatisfying; unproductive; depressing. Much like Chelsea in general, who having been a side flooded with forward options all staking a claim to be included in Maresca’s thriving starting XI before Christmas now look incredibly short of ideas and increasingly reliant on Cole Palmer, making them very easy to play against when he’s not on song, as Brighton showed.
Chelsea fans will be worried by their malaise, with the West Ham win a mere pause in their slide towards mediocrity, which continued here to see them limp out of the FA Cup, with Brighton now likely very much looking forward to their clash with the Blues in the Premier League on Friday.
When they will almost certainly come up against Sancho again, because of Maresca’s now bare-bones options in those previously well-stocked forward positions, which leaves the Chelsea boss with little choice but to hope that Sancho can rediscover his early season form and revert his personal slide into the doldrums that saw the wheels fall off in such dramatic fashion at Manchester United.
