“What happens is…” – Sky pundit explains why Chelsea’s attack has failed totally | OneFootball

We wrote about Paul Merson’s thoughts on a worrying Chelsea performance earlier, but he also went into quite a lot more detail on what he thought was going wrong in attack for the Blues.

In 180 minutes against Brighton in the last two games, we’ve managed one shot on target – and it was a deflected cross from Cole Palmer.

The attack is totally broken, and Merson thinks he knows why:

“I said before the game, I would have taken a draw last night. They miss Jackson. Palmer makes Jackson, Jackson makes Palmer. He does. People will sit there and say ‘oh don’t be silly, Palmer’s an unbelievable player’, but you’re only as good as the players you’re playing with, that are playing in front of you,” Merson said.

“He’s got no movement at the moment. So what happens is, when he doesn’t make those runs Jackson, and he’s a willing player, he always makes runs. When he makes runs, he stretches the game, then Palmer comes into the spaces and gets the ball. Now Nkunku comes short, Palmer comes short and everything just closes up. And in the end, I’m at West Ham last week, Palmer’s getting the ball off the centre half! I mean West Ham are like ‘that’s handy, what’s he gonna do?'”

You can see Merson speaking in the clip from Sky Sports embedded here:

Solutions not forthcoming for struggling Blues

Paul Merson worried about Chelsea on Sky Sports.

So rather than stress about the issues, what possible solutions do we have? Well Maresca had a full week between last week’s defeat and this week’s, and in all that time on the training ground he apparently didn’t come up with anything new. We played the same way, with the same results.

Something has to change for our next match.