Chelsea are still unbeaten and face an unpredictable Liverpool side who have the talent but have not yet clicked this season yet.
Mourinho’s tactics, no matter how negative they may be won him the game against the merseysiders last season. Will he stick to the same defensive approach this time?
Here is Chelsea’s confirmed starting XI formation vs Liverpool.
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Mixed opinions about the first 45 minutes. The defense for goodness sake, needs to get a grip. Chelsea’s equalizer showed how bad the marking was with 3 Chelsea players on their own within the six yard box one of which scored. If zonal marking is what they are doing and it certainly looks that way Liverpool need to do one of two things. One, do it right and secondly, if it is not working, change it up. You cannot leave a team with 3 open players that close to the goal without being punished. Sterling needs to be careful after picking up a pretty lame early yellow although was unlucky with Ramires leading with his elbow. Mignolet has made a couple of decent stops but has the defense under unwanted and unnecessary pressure with his poor clearances. Balotelli has played fairly well but needs to careful not to let his temper get the better of him. Teams know about this and will try and provoke him into reacting. It is a shame however, that either his forward thinking is lacking or he lacks drive. There have been a couple of notable occasions when if Balotelli had either made a run or continued his run, he may have just found himself in space with a scoring opportunity. Bring on the second half!
Have to say, unless something miraculous happens in the last bit of injury time, I have to say that the effort and commitment has been for the most part, lacking and disappointing. To be honest, for the most part, Liverpool played better and achieved more on Wednesday night at Real Madrid and they lost the game. There were a few so called “first team favorites” that were missing, supposedly being rested for the game today, I did not see any real extra effort from those rested players. For me personally, I bring attention to the team selection. Yes, he brought Sterling and Coutinho closer to in support to Balotelli, but still he could not bring it. He was caught offside too many times and his positional play when going forward I have to say was definitely sad. Yet another overall disappointing display and sorry to seem to be getting ahead of myself, but I really do wonder about Rodgers tactics and how much time FSG are going to afford him. You cannot get away from the of the huge investment FSG made over the summer and the poor run of results. Managers these days usually do not have the luxury of having a bad season and still remaining in place, especially after the amount of investment that Rodgers was given.
Very well done to my blues team. Keep it up the blues and go for the ultimate