Gary Lineker has been on the Rest Is Football podcast this Monday, speaking about Chelsea’s exciting game against Man City on Saturday night.
He was critical of one of Mauricio Pochettino’s decisions – taking off Cole Palmer who had been playing on the wing for the first hour. He replaced him with defender Trevoh Chalobah, which meant the Blues sat ever deeper as the game went on.
“I was very, very surprised when he [Pochettino] took Cole Palmer off, because they were at a stage where they were struggling to get out and he was the one player that could keep the ball at that particular point, and keep them in the game and then he took him off putting a defender on, and they were kind of even deeper, weren’t they? And it was kind of inevitability they would score, and they could have actually pinched it in the end.”
It’s easy to conclude that it was a poor decision, but there are a lot of mitigating circumstances.
Chelsea looked exhausted in the latter stages after putting everything in to a high energy first hour, and needed changes. Changing to a back 3 also helped us cover the width of the pitch better.
What we can agree is that even if Palmer had to come off, we should have maintained one player on the pitch who could act as an outlet. Christopher Nkunku wasn’t up to it on his own, and in the end it cost us.
