Thomas Tuchel has blown everyone away in his first few months at Chelsea. From the day he arrived results improved dramatically, the players looked comfortable in a new system and full of confidence again, and the new manager has made a great start in winning over the English media and sceptical fans who were unhappy with the sacking of previous manager Frank Lampard.
The stunning 5-2 loss to West Brom over the weekend – the joint worst defeat in Chelsea’s Premier League history – brings the first big test of all those positives.
After a 14 game unbeaten run, the Blues were derailed at home in the most humiliating fashion possible, and their response to that result will tell us a great deal about what we can expect from the rest of this season and beyond.
So much has happened since the Autumn that it’s easy to forget that Lampard himself had an amazing unbeaten run this season. He reached 17 games, before defeat against Everton reversed his team’s fortunes in an instant and sent them into a death spiral of shattered confidence which he could never drag them out of.
Chelsea won just 2 of their next 8 league games, and little over a month after they were flying high, the club legend was sacked, and was Tuchel in place to begin his own impressive sequence.
This is where the former PSG coach can prove his quality over Lampard, who looked unable to rescue his team from the terminal decline they entered from the moment the spell was snapped. This squad has looked mentally fragile on plenty of occasions in recent years, and the way they swung from unbeaten to broken in the space of 90 minutes back in December was a perfect illustration of that.
The new manager injected great belief and confidence when he arrived, and it’s been easy to maintain that as the positive results have rolled in. It will be a test to keep spirits high now, but there are factors in his favour too.
He can point to the unique, freakish circumstances of the weekend’s defeat, with an early red card to Thiago Silva conditioning the whole game, as well as the early kick off time after an international break, as major factors in the loss. His voluntary rotation of the side didn’t help – but given how effectively it has worked so far, there can’t be many complaints about that either.
The fact that the next game is such an important one – the “away” leg against Porto in the Champions League – could play into Tuchel’s hands too. The structure he has his team playing in seems to suit the cagier matches and the big occasions, and he’s already won impressive victories against the very best opposition both domestically and in Europe.
The return of important players like Mason Mount, Andreas Christensen and Antonio Rudiger to the team will mean more than just fresh legs too – it will mean fresh minds not scarred by the embarrassment of Saturday.
So while this defeat is as historic and humiliating as any Chelsea have had in some time, there is good reason to believe it can be left behind as an anomaly and a warning against overconfidence, rather than remembered as the start of another damaging slide back towards mediocrity.