At the final whistle, loud boos reverberated around Stamford Bridge, but they abated quickly and did not carry the visceral, toxic fury that usually assails coaches who are on the brink. That might have been partly because some Chelsea supporters, recognising their players had lost belief in erasing Aston Villa’s two-goal lead well before the end, had taken their cue to leave. It might also have been because for those who remained, anger had given way to misery.
In any case, Graham Potter did not take the chance of venturing onto the pitch at full time. Instead, he waited in front of the tunnel, acknowledging all of his players as they walked off and shaking hands with the match officials before venturing inside to navigate his post-match media duties in trademark maddeningly measured style.
The mask had slipped a few minutes earlier though. Watching his demoralised players listlessly play out the final moments from his technical area, the TV camera found him eyes downcast, grimacing and biting his bottom lip — the look of a coach who knows his results are testing the limits of patience beyond anything endured in his club’s modern history.
Chelsea are in the bottom half of the Premier League in April, a depth not even reached at this late stage in the annus horribilis of 2015-16. Villa dealt them a 10th league defeat of the season – the most they have lost in a single campaign this century is 12. With 10 matches remaining, including trips to Arsenal and Manchester City, that record looks in danger, too.
Eight of those 10 losses have been suffered under Potter and this one belongs alongside February’s home defeat to Southampton in terms of how damagingly it reflected on the coach’s decision-making. His team selection was curious from the outset: Kalidou Koulibaly the only natural centre-back in the starting XI, flanked by Reece James and Marc Cucurella in a three-man defence.
Even more curious is that in training at Cobham on Friday, Trevoh Chalobah was in Potter’s back three. The 23-year-old has not started for Chelsea since the goalless draw with Liverpool at Anfield in February and neither he nor Benoit Badiashile ever looked close to being introduced against Villa despite a lack of height hampering the team in both boxes.
“We wanted to attack, we wanted to use Marc and Reece as two laterals, that’s where the space would be and they can construct attacks well,” Potter said.
The problem was that it left Chelsea wide open defensively in the early stages, with Ollie Watkins first exploiting a huge gap between Koulibaly and James and then a catastrophic mix-up between Cucurella and the Senegal international to twice run clean through on Kepa Arrizabalaga. He should have scored both.
Potter can point to the fact that, according to Opta, Aston Villa’s final expected goals (xG) value was 0.81 — a perfectly respectable defensive number and a marked decrease from what Leeds United, Leicester City and Everton had managed against Chelsea in the preceding league games. But 0.75 of that figure was achieved in the first 18 minutes, after which Unai Emery instructed his team to scale back their attacking ambition because they had a lead to protect.
Villa did not protect it particularly well, but Chelsea’s typically poor finishing ensured they did not need to. Mykhailo Mudryk missed the kind of chance he has been crying out for since having a goal ruled out against Leicester, having earlier seen another shot smothered by Emiliano Martinez at close range. Joao Felix went close on several occasions and Kai Havertz had a goal-bound flick from a fierce James shot blocked in the six-yard box.
Emery switched from a back four to a back five at the interval and as the game wore on, Chelsea’s attacking pressure manifested itself in an escalating number of crosses and corner kicks; unfortunate, then, that Havertz, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Koulibaly were the only players in blue 6ft or taller. At the other end, failure to properly clear one of Villa’s two corner kicks in the game gave John McGinn the chance to seal the win.
The flaws in Potter’s starting approach had been exposed but his substitutions made Chelsea worse. N’Golo Kante’s long-awaited introduction cut short the audible chants of “You don’t know what you’re doing” from the Matthew Harding Stand, but the man he replaced was Mudryk. Havertz and Joao Felix found it more difficult to press Villa’s defenders without the Ukraine forward while Kante spent more of his time ahead of the ball than on it, occasionally looking a little unsure of his role and missing the best scoring chance of the second half.
Any tactical coherence lapsed 10 minutes from time when Conor Gallagher and Christian Pulisic were introduced for Cucurella and Mateo Kovacic. Chelsea ended with Ben Chilwell and James — arguably their most consistently productive attackers over the past two years — either side of Koulibaly in the back three, Pulisic and Noni Madueke as wing-backs and Kante as an auxiliary forward. Villa saw out the win in relative comfort.
As we enter the eighth month of Potter’s tenure, such chaos is disconcerting. The unique mitigating circumstances he has navigated since succeeding Thomas Tuchel are important to the broader context and have been documented at length, but even that has its limits. Any hope that wins over Leeds United, Borussia Dortmund and Leicester City might present the first green shoots of recovery is difficult to sustain after the 2-2 draw with Everton and defeat to Villa.
Chelsea are 11th, which is where they would sit if the Premier League season had started the day Potter was appointed. His 22 matches have yielded 21 goals for and 21 against. Over that time his team’s accumulated xG is 28.3, while the accumulated xG against is 27.2. By virtually every statistical measure, this Premier League sample size, which is no longer insignificantly small, screams mediocrity.
The consequence of that is while Potter can reasonably cite numerous factors outside of his control for Chelsea’s struggles, he cannot yet credibly make a case for why he should be the man trusted to lead this extremely well-funded project into next season.
If he survives long enough to do so, it will only be thanks to Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali displaying a level of pain tolerance unprecedented in the history of the Premier League.
(Top photo: Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
