Blink often enough and you can persuade yourself things are beginning to come into focus for Chelsea. This side are a long way from the sort of consistency that would allow them to mount anything resembling a title challenge, shaky at the back even when they’re not scoring spectacular own goals, but there are perhaps just signs that the front part of the team, tentatively, uncertainly, is beginning to emerge from the fog.
Nicolas Jackson is emblematic of the project. The Senegal forward is still only 22 and had started just 16 top-flight games when he arrived from Villarreal last summer. Perhaps had Christopher Nkunku been fit, less would have been expected of him – although given Nkunku is not an out‑and‑out striker, perhaps not – but, as it was, Jackson was expected to lead the line straight away.
Given his lack of experience, being an instant regular for a Premier League side would have been difficult enough whatever the circumstances, but with no experienced players around him to provide the structure, to coax and nourish and offer guidance and support, there was a serious danger he would wilt. A few big chances missed in the opening months of this season and he became almost a joke figure, one of a growing number of modern forwards – Darwin Núñez, Timo Werner, Raheem Sterling – who are manifestly talented but who you wouldn’t trust in a one-on-one.
The underlying danger of Chelsea’s absolute focus on youth, of the uncertainty brought by the wholesale changes, was the risk that this whole generation, for all their promise, could disappear amid the chaos, sunk by a negative spiral of flattering form and dipping confidence without senior figures to provide stability or help drag them back.
But in recent weeks Jackson and, to a lesser extent, Mykhailo Mudryk, have started to hint that they may be working out a way to play. What has certainly become apparent is just how talented Jackson is. At 1.88m he is taller than his slightly hunched gait makes him appear and adept at holding up the ball. That was perhaps the first facet to emerge from the anxious bundle of the early weeks of the season, but he also runs well with the ball, and his distribution has improved radically as he has grown in confidence.
Where once it felt there was a risk of clutching at straws in highlighting anything he did well, there was no surprise when he set up the opener on Sunday in the 4-2 FA Cup quarter-final win against Leicester, making a run down the right channel to gather Cole Palmer’s swift forward pass as Chelsea broke. It’s true that he will come up against far more mobile centre-backs than Jannik Vestergaard but, still, as he ran at Leicester’s colossus there was only ever going to be one outcome. Jackson shaped one way then the other, eventually went right and squared the ball to give Marc Cucurella a tap-in.
There was a decent chance created for Sterling – although Sterling was in one of those moods in which almost no chance for him is a good chance – and then it was his surge on to Sterling’s ball and burst past Vestergaard – for Sterling was in one of those moods in which he could do extremely useful things with the ball, so long as it didn’t actually involve him scoring – that led to a red card for Callum Doyle when the Chelsea forward was tripped on the edge of the box.
Coventry v Manchester United
Manchester City v Chelsea
Ties to be played at Wembley on the weekend of 20-21 April.
This is still Jackson, though. He is still developing as a player and the area perhaps most obviously in need of development is his finishing. There was a shot fired hopelessly into the side netting just after half-time and then, in the final minute, a chance from 12 yards out fired high over the bar.
What is important is that he kept going, kept making the runs. Carney Chukwuemeka and Palmer will rightly take the credit for their one-two that brought Chelsea’s third, but it was Jackson pulling wide that created space for the substitute before he nudged the ball into his path.
The positive is that Jackson has now scored 12 goals and registered four assists in all competitions this season. It’s not possible, of course, to strip away the context entirely, and his misses can neither be forgotten nor ignored. But imagine this were a more conventional side, rather than one that had ripped up a Champions League winning squad and splashed a billion pounds on potential. A 22‑year‑old who had been involved in 16 goals in his first season in England would be regarded as extremely promising.
With Palmer, Mudryk and perhaps Chukwuemeka, there is, possibly, a forward line for the future beginning to take shape. But that is yet another game this season in which Chelsea have had more than enough chances to win easily and somehow ended up in a ding-dong. Great for the neutral, but probably not for the winning of trophies.
