You can’t even, you can’t even, you can’t even make a sub. It took half an hour from kick-off for the Tottenham fans to find the best joke to date about Chelsea’s latest psychodrama on the theme of authority and control.
And yet by the end that wheel had turned completely. It was instead the Chelsea fans who cheered their team and taunted the away support, after a performance of fire and purpose by a team that is constantly in the process of dying and resurrecting itself, west London’s own zombie FC.
As expected, Maurizio Sarri had left Kepa Arrizabalaga out of his starting side. Kepa sat on the bench instead. Before kick-off, the goalkeeper helped warm up his replacement, Willy Caballero, a 37-year-old whose last real run at being a No 1 was at last summer’s World Cup, where he kept goal like an arthritic alpaca for Argentina, the punchline to the universal joke of Lionel Messi’s stricken brilliance in such a flawed and fumbling team. No matter. Chelsea dressing-room revolts come and go but that blue machine keeps on rolling along. Odd as it might sound, a 2-0 win leaves Chelsea seven points behind erstwhile title-challengers Tottenham with a game in hand.
There will be a temptation to style this win as a reaction to the dropping of Kepa, a message sent out to the squad, a manager flexing his muscles and all the rest of it. But when has this club ever stuck to such a hackneyed script? This is Chelsea, where the world keeps on ending, where things fall apart every six months, but still people keep on turning up asking where the party is.
It is probably best to get the Willy-watch stuff out of the way first thing. Chelsea’s No 2 keeper had cut a haunting figure on that Wembley touchline on Sunday, stoop-shouldered in his lime green two-piece, a ghost-player whose un-substitution will forever be asterisked on the record of that day.
His first real moment on Wednesday came on 27 minutes as he punched Antonio Rüdiger in the head clearing the ball. Towards half-time Caballero was smacked in the face by a close-range shot. Briefly you wondered if he was concussed. Would he perhaps refuse to come off? Would we see Kepa on the touchline looking lost and empty, while Caballero airily dismissed the subs board?
Not this time, sadly. But something has clearly stirred, because Chelsea were excellent. They took the game to Tottenham with a fury from the start. Gonzalo Higuaín spanked a shot on to the post. David Luiz ragged Harry Kane to the ground. Eden Hazard sniped about in his No 10 role. Twelve minutes into the second half Pedro scored a beautifully worked opener, followed at the end by a horrible, slow-motion Kieran Trippier own goal.
Sarri on his touchline rose cautiously now and then, slightly bent in his navy padded suit. The Kepa incident seems to have lent him an extra veneer of quiet dignity. Sarri may well still be on his way out. But he has something of the wronged, dying patriarch about him now. At the very least the inquest will be kinder. Imagine trying to impose a detailed tactical system on a group that will not come off the pitch even when you ask them.
Three days later, the Kepa incident still looks remarkable. It was one of those moments where football seems to sag in the middle, the doors falling off, engine parping, custard coming out of the exhaust pipe. But with a little distance two things are clear.
First, there are no random moments in sport. The Kepa protest stinks of something wider; failure that stretches back up the arm and into the bigger picture of how the club is managed and run. Chelsea have teetered on the edge of madness, simultaneously a brilliantly well-run machine and an oligarchy of influences and power plays. Now and then the wild things have taken charge. Sarri has been there seven months. This is hardly his doing.
Second, the Kepa affair has overshadowed some actual progress. Sarri, the man who never budges, has found a way of re-balancing this team. Jorginho played well here, passing the ball a little quicker. N’Golo Kanté has been effective in his minutely rejigged but highly controversial role slightly to the right. Hazard’s weakness as a defender has been camouflaged by playing him further forward.
Most notably Sarri is still standing. He has seemed to flicker and fade on the touchline at times, has been portrayed as an absurd Monsieur Hulot-type bungler.
The level of bile directed his way is salutary. A highfalutin European, unapologetically wedded to his own ideas. Rarely has anyone pressed quite so many tender points in the English football psyche.
And yet Sarri has regained a kind of strength in the past few days, has seemed calmer and more sure-footed as the level of dysfunction around him has revealed itself. Defiance is the Chelsea way. For the first time, Sarri seemed to have borrowed a little of that himself.