P302Rivals Football - Chelsea FC
Jorginho
by Famous, 15/01, 11:51

After watching his Napoli team fairly regularly, what we’re seeing at the moment is not how I saw them play. I took a shine to them long before he was ever linked with us so I wasn’t watching them for any other reason other than I enjoyed it. The exciting and effective Napoli side he created didn’t just happen overnight, the same way it took time for Pep’s methods to sink in and work at City (for example). I think people are watching us at the moment and equating this with so-called ‘Sarriball’ (a term others coined in his honour), which I think is unfair on Sarri because what we’re seeing currently is only how the players we have are executing it and not exactly what he would want. Poor/flawed execution can make any plan look worse. Even having said that, I still don’t actually think it’s half as bad as a lot of people seem to be saying - something as simple just having a proper, on-form centre forward (ie not Morata) who scores goals (ie not Giroud), would change the whole outlook. I think the Spurs league game is the only match where we haven’t had more and better chances than our opponents.

It is possible that system won’t work in this League the way it did so well in Italy but am positive that with time/personnel changes, it should come, provided the club gives him those things. It was always going to take time to completely change the way we play and even longer to perfect it, so to judge him only a few months in (with very little chance to work on it pre-season) seems harsh to me. We knew we weren’t going to be getting a pragmatist who was only ever going to be about short-term impact, and the club clearly doesn’t want to keep bouncing around from manager to manager every season anymore, otherwise they’d never have gone for a head coach like Sarri.
In the meantime, we’re only one point off a Spurs team who are years ahead of us in terms of building with their manager/squad, six points off last season’s runaway champions (who, like the leaders and Spurs, are also years ahead of us in terms of building with their manager/squad) and also six points clear of 5th place where we ended up last season, still in all the Cup competitions we started in too, so as transition periods go we’re still on course to achieve what I think the expectations were/should have been at the start of the season.