Graham Potter and Chelsea still searching for a plan amid the chaos

So, that plan. Everyone wants to see the plan, to see the world in a grain of sand, to see the nuts and bolts of a sophisticated modern footballing philosophy in a promising 15-minute spell either side of the break. The truth is, there is no plan yet. Just the kind of mid-tempo chaos you get when you are still at the thick end of one of the most audacious experiments ever seen in elite football. The bottom line is that Chelsea still can’t keep the ball and they still can’t keep it out. Everything else is bubbling test tubes and incomplete data.

There were 21 shots in the 1-0 defeat at Dortmund, which is at least something. João Félix probably should have had a couple of goals, Gregor Kobel made several fine saves for the hosts and, naturally for a Graham Potter team, the xG was off the charts. You might even argue that this was the sort of game Chelsea deserved to win. All the same, they keep failing to win them, largely because they keep doing the sort of things that teams do when they have no map, no structure to fall back on, no collective consciousness to drag them through the tough bits.

It was telling that with 20 minutes remaining, Potter reached for Marc Cucurella and Mason Mount: his tried and trusted toys. Mount made one fine tackle high up the pitch to create an opening; Cucurella, by contrast, wandered around like a man who had just stumbled out of a house fire. Booed when he came on and hounded every time he got the ball, there was a kind of pathos to him here: a £50m footballer who no longer really knows what any of this means, who no longer knows what the plan is here.

But of course these things work both ways. Opponents can’t really work you out if you don’t know what you’re doing yourself. If you’re a rival coach who wants to know how this Chelsea side combine with each other, how they react in certain situations, what do you do? What footage do you consult? And perhaps Chelsea’s best moments here were when the patterns broke down and they were forced to trust to pure individual quality at each end.

Thiago Silva heading away cross after cross. Mykhaylo Mudryk running at Marius Wolf on the left wing, losing it and inevitably getting it back again. Félix fluttering this way and that in the final third. Hakim Ziyech looking sharp in the second half. If you’re a coach with a vision and a blueprint, you take tactics over talent every time. But there are times when talent really doesn’t hurt.

The flip-side was the ease with which Dortmund could pass through Chelsea’s press, which at this stage of its gestation remains a largely theoretical thing. There are players in positions, certainly. Some of them running in a gutsy sort of way towards the ball. But virtually no concept of spacing or coordination just yet, no sense of a team moving as one, a system run by Zoom call. Can you communicate at all when the noise is this deafening and nobody really knows each other’s movements yet?

Graham Potter watches on as his Chelsea side lose the first leg of their last-16 Champions League tie with Borussia Dortmund 1-0 in Germany. Photograph: Paul Currie/Shutterstock

Perhaps the best example of this was at set pieces. Has a losing team ever taken as long over set pieces as this? Every free-kick seemed to involve a board-level summit, four or five players congregating on the ball while Silva waved his arms behind them. Goal-kicks were a similar story: as the centre-halves dutifully spread wide, Kepa looked up and realised that in the time he needed to set himself, every single teammate was marked. What’s the plan here, then?

And after that promising 15-minute spell, things fell apart in the most Chelsea way possible. Chelsea were offside at a corner, some players stopped, some players didn’t, and all of a sudden Karim Adeyemi was burning Enzo Fernández for pace, scoring the only goal of the game. If there was an irony here it was that the immaculately honed and structured Dortmund had struck Chelsea in just the way Chelsea were most likely to strike themselves: with a searing direct counterattack, a flash of individual brilliance, a finish that seemed almost prosaic in its assurance.

These are the sorts of things that happen when you are all cast and no movie. And as Dortmund cycled through their substitutes, there was perhaps another lesson for Chelsea here too. Dortmund have in many ways perfected a very similar model Chelsea are trying to follow: harvest Europe’s top young talent, develop it, nurture it, watch it swell in value. Adeyemi, a £30m summer signing from Salzburg, has been trusted through a torrid period by coach Edin Terzic, slowly learning his own game and Dortmund’s. Does Potter have the time to give a struggling young player that kind of leeway? Or does he simply shuffle in the next promising young card off the deck? What exactly is the plan here?

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Potter, for his part, seems like a coach second-guessing himself, torn between long-term renewal and short-term impact. The fans are already beginning to turn; desperate to see an A-list coach with this A-list squad. Chelsea still have a foot in this tie, which represents perhaps their last remaining thread to Champions League football next season. If it breaks, Potter may well end up being cut loose with it.