For Chelsea fans, or indeed anyone with an interest in the high-rev methods of Antonio Conte, there was a slightly alarming moment as the first Premier League international break arrived at the start of October. Conte announced he would be going to Italy to rest. He was already exhausted. OK, then. Just the 31 league games, two domestic cups, one transfer window and 10-15 miles of febrile touchline sprints left to go this season. What could possibly go wrong from here?
It is understandable Conte should have arrived in west London less than refreshed given his summer at Euro 2016, the burdens of starting a major job and his own full-body absorption in the process: the hair-tearing grief at every setback, the tendency to celebrate each high with uncontained, eye-popping joy, haring about like a man who has just struck oil beneath his patio decking or made the first ever recorded discovery of chocolate ice cream.
In reality Conte is simply a manager who works best coiled tight and always on the edge. In this respect he looks a pretty good fit for a Premier League season where top spot has changed hands nine times and where the ability to cajole a cohesive whole out of a new-ish group of players while simultaneously sliding down the banisters and performing complex calculus on an abacus is likely to decide the destiny of an open title race.
With just under a third of the season gone four points separate the top five teams, all of whom have a reasonable chance of going on to win it. Beyond this the league is unusually interesting in a tactical sense, with a shared attempt at the top to marry technical players and positional fluidity with a full-throttle physicality that feels quite English in its unquestioning intensity.
As Conte nipped off for a lie-down at the start of October there was a view in these pages that any team finishing ahead of Liverpool at the end of the season would do so “bloodied and blistered and breathless”. Six weeks on the latest club to take up the slack at the front of the peloton are Chelsea, to whom the same reasoning might now be applied. Chelsea’s current run of six league wins without conceding a goal has its roots in Conte’s bold shift of shape in September. The early attempts at a 4-2-4 had already begun to elide into a 4-3-3. Defeat by Arsenal brought some soul-searching and a more profound change to 3-4-3, with Cesc Fàbregas discarded and the roles of three key players clarified with thrilling results.
At which point, enter David Luiz, defensive giant. Yes, that David Luiz, a player who has had a peculiar double-life, damned by his own relentlessly trumpeted mistakes and at the same time rewarded with ever more extravagant playing contracts. During the last World Cup in Brazil there was an airline advert that featured a zanily grinning David Luiz in full pilot's outfit proudly inviting you to board his waiting jet, arguably the least reassuring passenger safety message ever devised.
And yet he has been key to Chelsea’s recent stability, not just as a deep playmaker at the heart of that three but as the aggressive, spirited defensive leader he has always been in between the odd horrific performance. Aged 29 now, the only major club football medal to escape the world’s most expensive defender across European three countries is - so far - a Premier League title medal. Which is fairly steady going for a man routinely dismissed as a flake and a saboteur.
Further upfield Eden Hazard has been liberated by the 3-4-3, allowed to operate in forward gear by a manager who has accepted his lack of cover rather than simply fuming at it like a disappointed stepdad. In 12 league games Hazard has made 52 successful dribbles, compared with 89 the whole of last season. He should pass his total of 36 shots in the whole of 2015-16 against Tottenham on Saturday. Against that Hazard has made just four tackles. But Chelsea are top, and their best player has rediscovered his lateral spring, the ability to take the ball and turn in a single movement.
Victor Moses, high-class wing-back, has been the most obvious gain. Moses is also the epitome of a common trait among the insurgent Conte-Klopp-Guardiola managerial type, the ability to make good use of the things that they find, recycling some talented but dormant part into a key component. Like James Milner's fine turn at left-back, or Guardiola's tweaking of key creative midfielders, Moses has been Conte's own Womble-player, an itinerant winger and No10 across five English clubs before the age of 25 but now in the best period of his career as a powerful and utterly committed right wing-back.
The sudden surge of eviscerating form, sparked by a decisive switch of shape, is nothing new in a Conte team. There are parallels with his first season at Juventus in 2011-12, where 14 of his first 27 Serie A matches were drawn but Juve ended up winning the title unbeaten in the league. Conte had been desperate to fit the thrillingly energetic Arturo Vidal into his team. In late September Vidal finally made the starting XI, Juve ran through Milan in Turin, a new 4-3-3 shape was up and running and Conte was on his way to a hat-trick of titles.
As with Juve that year the lack of European football looks a significant advantage for Chelsea. There is an idea that the major plus here is to do with fatigue or injury, but managers talk instead of simply having those extra two days to plan and drill their players. Such is the way of the modern coach. In contract with the old Alex Ferguson-era idea of momentum, winning teams rolling on with the same system, combinations ever-more grooved under pressure, it is the interventionist, hands-in-the-cake-mix tendencies of the modern breed that stand out.
Conte is obsessed with the fitness and physicality of his players, talking constantly with his medical staff, brooding over sprockets and hinges like an F1 pit boss, shifting his team on reports of twinges and twangs. Similarly the hands-on nature of Jurgen Klopp’s coaching has been noted, the tendency to physically haul players around the training pitch, something Ron Greenwood could be seen doing at West Ham in the 1970s.
Klopp’s Liverpool experienced their first little gulp this weekend, as Southampton set out to defend against a slightly depleted team. Like a batsman who comes out and hits a flurry of fours, then has to change gear as the field drops back, Klopp will now look to adjust, to pick up the ones and twos, to hold Liverpool’s attacking fire for the right moment.
No doubt the same process of reeling in and counter-adjustment will hit Chelsea in the coming weeks as opposition managers find a way to get behind the wing-backs or to harry David Luiz as Middlesbrough did on Sunday. Chelsea’s next two opponents are Tottenham and Manchester City. This evolving team may find life less comfortable against similar high-intensity machines, fellow hard-pressers. But a year on from the last days of José they can at least be sure they will not fail for want of sheer, thrilling focus.
(Guardian service)
