Enzo Maresca had no difficulty in pinpointing the precise moment a positive Chelsea performance against Bournemouth began to disintegrate in the face of familiar flaws.
“The first half has to finish with a different score because I think at least 2-0 was the one that we deserved,” said Chelsea’s head coach in his press conference after a 2-2 draw with Andoni Iraola’s side at Stamford Bridge. “Then in the second half after the penalty, the game completely changed. We dropped a little bit, probably we need to understand the reason why.”
There is no doubting Maresca’s fundamental point that Chelsea did not react at all well to the penalty Justin Kluivert converted in the 50th minute to bring Bournemouth level at 1-1. They grew rattled by the suffocating intensity of the visitors’ pressing, steadily losing structural integrity until Antoine Semenyo was allowed to isolate 18-year-old Josh Acheampong before lashing a brilliant left-footed shot past Robert Sanchez at his near post.
But in focusing his post-match analysis solely on Chelsea’s reaction to the spot kick, Maresca risks missing the glaring issue highlighted by the sequence of events that led to it.
Chelsea were in possession and in control near the halfway line. Enzo Fernandez leisurely explored the passing options to his left before checking back to his right. His eventual short pass across to Romeo Lavia was casual, but the hard sprint it prompted from the fresh Kluivert was anything but, immediately subjecting the normally unflappable Belgian receiving the ball to a degree of pressure he proved unable to handle.
Kluivert surged into the expanse of space behind Chelsea’s midfield. Semenyo and Moises Caicedo both set off running at the turnover of possession, but their race was a mismatch. In front of them, Dango Ouattara’s clever movement left and then right pulled Acheampong closer to Levi Colwill, creating space for Semenyo to run into and for Kluivert to aim his pass.
Caicedo’s barge as Semenyo prepared to receive the ball was clear, clumsy and an utterly uncontroversial penalty award for referee Robert Jones. It was the sixth spot kick Chelsea have conceded this season — more than any other team in the Premier League except Wolves (also six) and one more than they gave away in the entirety of 2023-24.
That is an eye-catching statistic and one indicative of a bigger Chelsea problem. The overwhelming majority of penalties are conceded by acts of panic or desperation, momentary errors of judgement made by footballers who have trained for their entire lives to retain clear-eyed composure on the pitch. Short-circuiting all that mental hardwiring typically requires a catastrophic individual mistake, a structural failure, or both.
Cast your mind back to the other penalties Chelsea have conceded this season. Wesley Fofana scuffing an attempted backpass to Sanchez in the reverse fixture against Bournemouth in September, allowing Evanilson to steal in and engineer a collision. A spinning Colwill trying to poke the ball away from Curtis Jones against Liverpool at Anfield in October but tripping him instead. Casemiro given the freedom of Old Trafford in November to float a cross over the head of Fofana to Rasmus Hojlund, who is then felled by Sanchez. Leicester City striker Jordan Ayew running into a huge gap in the middle of Chelsea’s penalty area before being tripped from behind by a scrambling Lavia. Liam Delap simply running harder than any defender to connect with a Leif Davis pass for Ipswich Town, beating Filip Jorgensen to the ball and going down.
Should we credit winning penalties as a measure of creativity?
Only the Delap penalty incident was remotely contentious. All sit somewhere on the individual mistake/structural failure Venn diagram and in a vacuum, each can be explained as the kind of unfortunate moment that happens to most players at some point in their careers, and to most teams over the course of a long season. But the relatively high frequency of these moments at Chelsea in 2024-25 suggests something systemic is going wrong in Maresca’s team.
That sense of a structural problem has deepened in recent weeks, over the course of a five-game winless run in the Premier League that has sunk Chelsea from fringe title contention into the thick of an increasingly competitive top-four race.
Maresca’s tactics have generally yielded positive first-half performances during this stretch, rewarded with deserved leads against Fulham, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth. But the game plan has rarely evolved to keep pace with second-half events and Chelsea’s conviction in the way they are being asked to play too often fades at the onset of adversity.
At times, even their energy levels have appeared deficient. Bournemouth’s stirring fightback at Stamford Bridge — pulled off with a matchday squad consisting of only 12 senior professionals — means Chelsea have lost seven points from winning positions in their last four games. Six of the seven goals they have conceded over that span have been scored after half-time.
It does not help that Maresca needs to be so cautious in his management of several of the small core of players he trusts in the Premier League.
Despite being at fault for the Bournemouth penalty, Lavia was one of Chelsea’s better performers and almost immediately after he was substituted in the 56th minute, any semblance of balance in the home side’s midfield disintegrated. The poor positioning that left Acheampong exposed to Semenyo in the 68th minute did nothing to dispel Enzo Fernandez’s growing reputation as a defensive liability.
Chelsea’s saving grace was that the man who replaced Lavia and assumed the armband from Fernandez picked a captain’s moment to remind Stamford Bridge just how brilliant he can be and rescue a point. Reece James is very capable of providing a level of fresh impetus that could be critical to reviving this team’s form in the Premier League — if he can stay on the pitch.
But that alone will not be enough. Chelsea’s problems in both boxes are easily linked: it is not hard to imagine fewer errors and jitters would occur in defence if Nicolas Jackson, so brilliant in combination with Cole Palmer against Bournemouth, was more clinical in front of goal, but it is also understandable that the frailties behind him might be an unhelpful presence in the back of Jackson’s mind when he is presented with scoring chances.
None of these tribulations are particularly shocking for the Premier League’s youngest squad. Maresca’s job is to keep their learning curve on a top-four trajectory. The setbacks of the last five games have brought into focus just how challenging that will be.
(Top photo: Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth/Getty Images)
