Chelsea’s Timo Werner hones his quality and homes in on scoring
Werner #Werner
Maybe Thomas Tuchel really is a tactical genius. Faced with a concrete-booted central defence and an opposing manager who insists on playing a high line, Tuchel picked his quickest attacker and told him to run in behind at every opportunity, to seek out the untended green acres, to run fast against people who can’t run fast. It’s a complex plan, Thomas. But it might just work.
And so it came to pass at Anfield, where Chelsea kept hitting the same long diagonal pass, and where Tuchel’s plan worked but also didn’t completely work, because Timo Werner is a player trying to find his game, his edge.
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With a little precision Chelsea could have been 3-0 up by the half-hour. In the event they held on to a 1-0 lead with few alarms against a Liverpool team who, frankly, look spooked right now.
This was in many ways the story of this game. A meeting of Werner, a goalscorer whose goalscoring has seemed shot in recent weeks, and opponents on the verge of one of the most astonishing home form turnarounds: this was always likely to involve a balancing of frailties and fears.
By the end Liverpool had extended that run to five home defeats. It is a mind-boggling collapse on the back of that 68-game unbeaten run.
Football is often cast as a science, the players as mobile data units, predictable in their movements, their chemistry, their interactions. But never let it be said this is anything other than a business of emotion, anxiety and human qualities, bound up in how the players feel.
Sixty-eight without defeat into five in a row: this really is wild. No matter what we throw at it, football remains the most brilliantly unknowable of human activities.
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As does the Liverpool defence. The centre-half duo of Ozan Kabak and Fabinho was Liverpool’s 19th pairing this season. This is nuts. Klopp can see it’s nuts. Injuries brought us here. The reaction to those injuries, the weakening of midfield, the inability to settle on trusted replacements: this has been, to some degree, a matter of choice.
Werner has also been fighting his shadow this season. He came back into the starting team with one goal in his past 17 league games, with a sense of a player who has simply left no imprint, who has if anything become more peripheral, further away from the heart of this Chelsea project.
A certain type of pundit has relished Werner’s very honest suggestion that the intensity of the Premier League has been a shock. Gaze upon our manly league, overseas dilettantes! We have discomfited a German. But that admission offers hope too, a mark of his intelligence as a footballer.
Here Werner played through the centre as something close to a No 9. His first act was to set off on a veering run from the centre circle, spinning out to the left. From the off it looked the right tactic against a defensive line marshalled by Kabak, who in this company moves with all the easy natural speed of a man paddling through a bog in a pair of snow shoes.
There was a painful moment as César Azpilicueta hooked the ball over the top and suddenly there was Werner right in front of Alisson, the ball bouncing awkwardly. Werner draped a boot out, like a man testing the direction of the wind.
There was hope though in his constant movement. Werner was offside four times in the opening hour. These were “good” offsides, born of pulling the game one way, stretching the Liverpool backline and driving Chelsea’s best spell in the game.
On 23 minutes it seemed like the moment had arrived. It was horrible for Liverpool. One pass cut them open. It wasn’t even really a pass, more a punt from the defensive line. Alison came cartwheeling off his line. Werner nicked the ball around him then finished. VAR disallowed the goal for an absurdly minuscule guesswork-offside close to halfway.
The message was clear, though. Liverpool looked, frankly, like a Sunday League defence in that moment, unable to deal with the most basic attacking gambit. And four minutes before half-time the same move brought Chelsea the only goal of the game.
Perhaps Werner deserved some kind of minor credit, a ghost assist. Liverpool’s defence shuffled back warily, dragged into uncomfortable places by that same diagonal pass. And Mason Mount showed Werner how to finish, jinking inside and spanking a hard low shot into the far corner with the look of a man relishing his own severity.
Goals have been a recent addition to Mount’s game at this level. But what a brilliant young player he is, with a very modern set of gifts: game intelligence, coachabiilty, a fine tactical brain.
Chelsea held on. Werner kept running, and kept missing chances, kept affecting the game while not affecting the game in the way he most wants. A forward in his position might feel crushed, disorientated, homesick. Werner has worn his pain publicly. But he seems also unbroken, still curious, still trying to solve this thing. This was progress. As for Liverpool, that ghost ship just keeps sailing on.