Unleash the carefully metered ticker-tape gun. Crack out the cautiously decanted champagne. This is a game that will perhaps be remembered above all for Enzo’s Run.
With 95 minutes on the clock, as Chelsea’s 18-year-old substitute Estêvão Willian scored the winning goal even before the shared intake of air around Stamford Bridge had been transformed into a barrelling roar, Enzo Maresca was off, sprinting down his touchline at astonishing speed, and showing classical form, hands carving the air, knees high, like a small, bald track-suited Allan Wells, then leaping with his players into the crowd.
Maresca had been weirdly animated all game, out there in full-figure hugging Galactic Jade club nylons and sculpted quilted coat, bristly, bald, even quite twinkly, like an ageing Jedi on his way to the gym. As Chelsea took the lead in the first half he even tried to conduct the crowd, demanding more noise, more heat, albeit with something oddly accusatory in his gestures.
Eventually Maresca returned from the mosh pit. He was sent off for his touchline run, an act of entirely alien positional insurrection from the most deathly of systems-managers. He disappeared, replaced by a generic baldy-beardy man from his stable of back-ups, and didn’t appear again at the end. Perhaps the rumours are true and Maresca just kept running, out of the ground and down the Fulham Road, passing Whitechapel by the time the sprinklers came on.
But then, this was momentous game in many ways. Mainly for Liverpool. Perhaps there will be relief of sorts. Either way the rabbits that have been rustling in the tree line for the past six weeks have finally come gambolling out into the paddock. Liverpool have lost three games in a row, two on successive league weekends. They are not, repeat not, top of the table.
This had to happen some time. It has been over a year now, the morning of 24 September 2024, since the last time last Arne Slot’s team weren’t at least level on points at the top. And by the end a 2-1 defeat here felt like a comprehensive status report on this team, its obvious strengths and its obvious flaws, the fact it seems every week now to be playing both its opponents and the glitches and snags in its own system.
Is this a crisis? Playing badly and winning in late season is a thing. Playing badly and winning in early season. Well, then you’re just playing badly. But if it is a crisis it’s quite an attractive one, a team that is still chugging along in the middle lane even as Slot works furiously under the bonnet. What will bother Slot is the way opposition managers are taking it in turns to pick at those holes, to work him out a little in advance, as Oliver Glasner did last weekend, and as Maresca did here.
Stamford Bridge had been chilly, grey and breezy at kick-off, the kind of day that seems always to be trying to get inside your shirt or up your sleeve. Maresca’s initial success came from playing Malo Gusto in midfield, creating a suffocating central block.
Liverpool were squeezed and hurried. Every time Alexis Mac Allister took the ball in deep areas Gusto was all over him, man-marking the fulcrum, choking Liverpool at source.
With 15 minutes gone neither team had created a chance. Then something out of the box happened. Moisés Caicedo found time and space on the ball, empty grass ahead of him. He took two more steps. Still nothing. Virgil van Dijk ran to his left apparently reacting to some swarming sense of danger. Presumably Van Dijk hasn’t watched Chelsea much. But it was enough. Caicedo had had time to set himself and shoot right to left into the top corner, a wonderfully pure strike, still rising as it clanged the metal strut that holds the net.
After that the system continued to work in the same way. Liverpool had two shots by half-time, none on target. You want to know what really gets to Maresca, what fills his legs with dynamite? Elite stifling. High-end interruption. And Chelsea did it here.
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If that first half showcased Maresca’s ability to set these traps where there is no urgency to drive the game forward, it also showed why Liverpool signed Florian Wirtz. Slot had spoken before this game about the need for a different kind of midfielder. Wirtz came on at the break and almost immediately found Mohamed Salah with a lovely spinning touch. Salah fired wide, weirdly, as he did often here, so blunt in his shooting you half expected to look down and notice he was playing in flippers.
Liverpool were better. Wirtz had a good spell. Chelsea went into random player generator mode, blue shirts hobbling off to the recycling plant to be broken down into parts and sent out again as João Philly-Cheese-Steak, promising non-specific defensive utility shield. Cody Gakpo got the equaliser. Chelsea came on strong at the end. Reece James was supreme, in full defensive warrior mode.
And Chelsea deserved to win overall. Liverpool looked muddled, albeit still groaning with talent and trapped energy. It is surely good for the league Liverpool are not top of the table in this state, that it isn’t possible to simply restock your attacking silos and march on seamlessly, that the reactions of your opponents are more nuanced.
The question remains. Are they now in crisis? Again, not the worst kind. There is a huge depth of talent to be explored. But there are also creaking parts. Right-back is a problem. Right-back refers pain into the midfield. Wirtz has affected the attacking balance, also the space behind him. This is like a combination boiler where a buildup of flange in your dredge capacitor is causing overheated trex to enter the z-bend via the shuffle valve.
Separately, and dating back to last season, Salah has dropped off a cliff. He was fouled a lot here, bounced up, but also couldn’t assert his own energy. He has three goals in 21 games in the league from open play. He isn’t the problem. But he also isn’t the solution right now.
This is not quite a crisis. But it is an opportunity for Arsenal, for the rest of the field. And for Slot too, to find answers to the tactical misfires, to fix this team on the hoof. Liverpool are a rejig away from looking like a very potent attacking team, if not perhaps a totally solid one. It feels at least, as we had into anther two-week international embalmment, as though the league is really starting in earnest.