When Chelsea appointed Liam Rosenior as their new manager back in January, he emphasized the fact that the team is in the perfect condition to compete, and he doesn’t need any time to get going.
Just over two months later, the world champions have exited the Carabao Cup while losing both legs of their semi-finals with Arsenal, a team they held to a draw while playing more than 60 minutes with 10 men under Enzo Maresca in October.
They have also been dumped out of the Champions League by PSG in an 8-2 aggregate score, a team they beat by three goals to nothing in the Club World Cup final back in the summer, even conceding five goals in a single game for only the second time in the competition following a 5-2 loss in Paris.
Making a place in next season’s UEFA Champions League has become a priority and with eight games to go, Chelsea sit out of the top five, with tough games against Man City, Man United, and Liverpool still to come.
Their only clean sheet in the last 14 games came in the Emirates FA Cup against Championship side Hull City, while they’ve gone from competing with Arsenal for most Premier League clean sheets to keeping just three in 18 games under Liam Rosenior.
The club has gone from competing on all four fronts to fighting for the top five slot, the same battle they fought in the previous two seasons, and one they vowed to avoid after their climax ending to last season.
His decision-making has been questionable. The former Strasbourg coach relegated Robert Sanchez to promote Filip Jorgensen to first-choice goalkeeper, even though the Spaniard has been one of the best players up to that stage of the season, while the latter ended up making costly errors in Paris.
Liam Rosenior: Unacceptable for the dreams sold
One would have loved to cut the former defender some slack, but he dug his own grave when he maintained that the team is ready to compete he will be up and running.
Six of the 10 wins he has recorded in his reign came in his first seven games, while three of the victories have also come against non-top-flight teams, excluding one laboured home 1-0 win over Cypriot side Pafos in the UEFA Champions League.
The 3-0 home loss to PSG not only made him the quickest Chelsea manager to suffer three consecutive defeats but also the biggest aggregate loss by an English team in a UEFA competition knockout tie since they lost 7-1 to Bayern Munich in the 2019-20 Champions League season.
But the troubles don’t get any easier with a trip to Everton coming this weekend, while they host Port Vale in a kind Emirates FA Cup quarter-finals draw immediately after the international break, before tough league fixtures follow.
A 4-1 victory away to Aston Villa has been their only positive result in the tough run, but that is nothing spectacular given the form of Unai Emery’s team. Greater questions will be asked in all of their remaining fixtures, many of which will be complicated for a team already outside the top five.
Chelsea was a team on the rise with Enzo Maresca, but they now look like they’re starting all over in the same season where they once looked like genuine contenders on all four fronts until a couple of months ago.
With how Liam Rosenior has performed so far and knowing the history of Chelsea, a replacement could be readied in a few months, because the former Hull City defender sold a dream upon his arrival, but his performance has not lived up to the hype.
Kehinde-Hassan Afolabi
