The Expert: Can Chelsea recover from record-ending defeat at Tottenham?
So, with two giant leaps, one long run is ended.
Tottenham Hotspur - and, specifically, Dele Alli - prevent Chelsea from going on what would have been the best single-season winning streak in English history, in a 2-0 home win that is likely to the best possible result for the competitiveness of this season’s actual title race.
A resurgent Spurs help crunch the top four together, the gap from second to first has been reduced to five points this week, and Chelsea’s air of invincibility finally evaporates after three impressive months and 13 successive wins.
That is also the big question from this game at White Hart Lane: will Mauricio Pochettino’s side opening up Chelsea lead to an opening of the title race; was this just a blip for Chelsea or is there a danger that a disruption of their run could lead to a disruption of their rhythm and over-arching confidence?
Could this be another sharp juncture moment in this season, a season when there has already been a few? There wasn’t too much outlandish about Tottenham’s win, beyond one particularly pointed tactic.
For the most part, Pochettino matched Antonio Conte’s three-at-the-back and sought to use Spurs’ energy while the Italian looked to rely on space, creating a fairly tight meeting that the home team probably just about edged on chances thanks to that energy and the movement of players like Christian Eriksen.
That could well have seen the game stay quite compact and on a knife-edge, except Pochettino seemed to have a specific design for Eriksen’s movement, and what he wanted out of it. The Dane supplied both goals, with very similar crosses, from the same area of the pitch: a pocket in front of the box on Chelsea’s left.
From that, Alli was able to suddenly arrive and score two near-identical looping headers. This seemed very planned, given it was repeated, so could it be repeated by others? There aren’t too many teams that would be able to go toe to toe with Chelsea in terms of formation in that way, and not many with a goalscorer of the particular type that Alli is, but the wonder is also whether Pochettino has figured out something in Conte’s backline.
Thibaut Courtois had not previously conceded any direct headers in this winning run, but Stoke City’s first goal in Saturday’s 4-2 win similarly came from a deep cross across the Chelsea box, and a header sending it back the other way. Is it possible Spurs have rumbled something there, a way to cause some chaos in that defence? They did seem unusually astray for both moves, especially David Luiz and Gary Cahill. If that’s the case, and Chelsea are suddenly more vulnerable to one type of attack, will they also be more fragile?
It is the funny thing about winning streaks like theirs. Sides often get to a point where they are almost running on the rhythm of the streak itself, with inherent knowledge of the fact they have been unbeatable, fortifying every action and keeping out the hesitation that can really undo them. Otherwise moderate or just good players are also able to play to a level way above themselves because everything is just working so well. The team is surfing a wave.
Once those runs end, though, that belief goes. The hesitation can return. Teams may suddenly over-think what they’re doing again. It happened when the last one of these runs ended, in the 2013/14 season. Chelsea themselves stopped Liverpool on 11 games, only for Brendan Rodgers’s team to hesitate - and collapse - once Crystal Palace pulled them back to 3-3 in their very next game. Something was just different about the side.
Chelsea didn’t have to think too much about their responses here. Conte and all of his players who spoke made sure to emphasise that this is just a blip, that the work continues, that the system is too good. That is likely to be true, although Gary Cahill did make one unfortunate comment in using one of Steven Gerrard’s more unfortunate lines form 2013/14 campaign, as he emphasised: “we go again”.
The next time Chelsea go again will actually be the FA Cup on Sunday against League One Peterborough, although that could be perfect, as it allows a little bit of breather and a chance to rebuild confidence. Given the nature of this season and the names involved, too, there is also a danger of reading too much into one reverse; an unwillingness to write it off as just one bad night.
Look at Tottenham. They’ve gone from the misery of October, and the ceiling that Pochettino had supposedly reached, to renewed talk of a title challenge. “I think our performance today showed that we can be competitive and we can achieve big things,” Pochettino said after his 150th Premier League match as a manager.
Whether they can achieve the biggest thing entirely depends on the answer to the biggest question from this game: whether Chelsea are beatable again; whether it’s possible they won’t surge away with this title. Alli has at least started things, with two finishes, to end a run.
