After making eight changes for this match, Vítor Pereira was asked why, with Nottingham Forest just three points clear of the relegation zone, he had taken such a risk with his personnel. “We change the players, but we keep the spirit,” he said. After this result, Chelsea’s hierarchy might be wondering quite what the “spirit” thing amounts to and where they might buy some of their own.
Forest ran through the home side, extending their unbeaten Premier League run to seven matches and doubling their gap to the bottom three with just three games remaining. Pereira was also able to rotate his squad before Thursday’s Europa League semi-final second leg against Aston Villa. For Chelsea, however, this was a sixth straight Premier League defeat for the first time since 1993, a 13th consecutive top-flight game without a clean sheet and a first (and solitary) goal in the league since the beginning of March. That the boos from the Stamford Bridge crowd were less oppressive at the finish than at half-time was only because so many had already left the stadium.
Led by two-goal Taiwo Awoniyi and the winger Dilane Bakwa, Forest’s understudies were every inch the match of the amortised investments they lined up against. The visitors went ahead in the second minute after Bakwa caught Marc Cucurella on his heels, peeled away on the right and dug out a cross to the back post which Awoniyi headed home.
By the 15th minute the lead had doubled and from precisely the same route: this time Bakwa simply dribbled past Cucurella before crossing and Awoniyi went for the ball again, only to fall to the ground after Malo Gusto tugged on his shirt. Following some back and forth with the video assistant referee, a penalty was given and Igor Jesus finished coolly.
Hardly the ideal start in front of a crowd on the verge of mutiny. But Chelsea’s performance did not kick on from there, nor even stagger back on to its feet. They remained sluggish across the piece, stunningly short on attacking ideas and consistently bested in duels by Pereira’s side. If those changes had seemed bold before kick-off, by half-time it seemed simply that the Forest manager had read the match-up correctly.
Calum McFarlane, Chelsea’s interim head coach, looked largely impotent on the sidelines. Before half-time he was forced to withdraw Jesse Derry, whom he had just given his Premier League debut, after the 18-year-old suffered what looked like a serious head injury after challenging for a corner with fellow teenager Zach Abbott. Both players were substituted under concussion protocols but while Abbott walked off, Derry left on a stretcher. Later, Chelsea confirmed Derry had been taken to hospital and that he was “conscious, talking and undergoing precautionary checks”.
The referee, Anthony Taylor, awarded a penalty for Abbott’s challenge but – after a break in play of more than 10 minutes – Cole Palmer was unable to convert, Matz Sels diving low to his right to save.
Pereira brought on three of his rested stars at half-time and those changes decided the game almost immediately. Within five minutes of the restart one reinforcement, Elliot Anderson, had split the lines with a pass to another, Morgan Gibbs-White, who ran beyond Cucurella once more. The Forest No 10 – in such hot form in recent weeks – laid the ball on a plate for Awoniyi who timed his run perfectly to grab his second goal of the day.
The cameo from Gibbs-White was brief. In the 60th minute he and Robert Sánchez were involved in another clash of heads, this time as the pair tried to chase down a loose ball. With a bandage around his head and what looked like a lot of blood underneath, Gibbs-White was withdrawn for Chris Wood after another lengthy stoppage in play. Sánchez was replaced by Filip Jörgensen. Forest now have a nervous wait on Gibbs-White’s fitness ahead of the Villa match.
With just over a quarter of an hour remaining Chelsea had the ball in the net, João Pedro heading home after seeing his first effort saved by Sels, only for the VAR to overturn it. Into added time, however, the Brazilian did score, taking a Cucurella delivery on his chest and smashing in an overhead kick. On this occasion there was no intervention from VAR, but as Chelsea recorded their first Premier League goal in seven games, there was not much in the way of cheering either.
