One of the biggest games of any Premier League season will always be when the favourites for the title clash, and that will be the scene at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday when Manchester City host Chelsea.
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Last season’s league winners spent relatively heavily during the summer, reinforcing and bringing depth in key areas, but the side who finished third last term splashed out heavily on proven recruits to not only give a better starting XI, but a better overall balance to the squad.
Manager Jose Mourinho has long been a successful manager with a clear blueprint for his teams: hard work, solidity in organisation and a blend of technique and power right throughout the spine of the team. Despite Chelsea’s vast expenditure over a prolonged period of time, Mourinho perhaps didn’t have that spine he would have wanted last season; the forwards are well-documented at having failed miserably in general—all three were shipped out this summer—and the midfield options, while internationals all, lacked creativity, incisiveness and individualism at times.
It led to Chelsea often struggling to break teams down by anything other than brute force when the likes of Eden Hazard failed to shine, and it was clearly priority number one to address over the summer transfer window.
Cesc Fabregas was the man brought in to slot into the centre of the park and, alongside Nemanja Matic, the duo have established themselves very quickly as a complete pairing, equally capable of defensive duties and closing out the opposition as of spring-boarding offensive transitions for their own team.
Matic is a destroyer and a guardian of the back line, but also a ball-carrier, an indefatigable athlete with a scorpion-like ability to thrust and sting when the opposition least expect it. Cesc provides the cutting edge and the relentless, accurate instinct to find space to receive and distribute the ball, time and time again.
Between them they define the “double pivot,” for no matter where Cesc places himself—behind or beyond Matic—he will look to get in possession and begin another attacking run for his side. Matic patrols and protects, happy to let his midfield partner rove around him in every direction in the knowledge that he, and the rest of the Chelsea midfield, will work hard to be in position and defending as a unit when the ball is lost.
The supply line which was so often missing last season is very much in place.
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Up against Manchester City, that midfield duo has surpassed and exceeded already even the very best that Manuel Pellegrini’s offering last season could muster, Fernandinho and Yaya Toure. Those two were excellent in spells, an extremely good pairing who were both capable of performing at both ends of the pitch…but Toure is not always as diligent about tracking back as he might be. Fernandinho prefers to have the length of the pitch to work in, but had to be reigned in at times to accommodate the Ivorian’s prowess at marauding forward. So far this season, even Toure’s attacking strengths have yet to hit the heights of last year after a troubled summer.
In a game of the magnitude of this weekend’s, small details matter immensely. Concentration and organisation can win a point, or lose one—and give three to the opposition. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see both Mourinho and Pellegrini opt to put their most offensive central midfielders into a No. 10 role this time around, perhaps pairing Matic with Ramires or Jon Obi Mikel in the middle and Fernandinho with Fernando.
Either way, in form and in all-round ability, Chelsea’s options seem to just have the edge in that area of the park this season. It’s a vital area which could be enough to see them take all three points this time around and, over the longer course of the season, take the title itself.
