Chelsea vs Leeds -Marking Strategies
In the wake of our closely fought 3–2 loss against Chelsea I wanted to give some thoughts about parts of the game, especially with how Leeds looked to deal with the marking of Chelsea’s backline and midfield.
As already commented on in the Pre Match Tactical Breakdown, we were in a 4–4–2 shape to deal with Chelsea’s 3–4–3 system, the way we marked the players looked something like the below.
Prior to this game Chelsea were averaging 500 completed passes with an average pass completion of 84%. In the game against us they only completed 377 passes and their pass completion dropped to 82%. So we clearly limited their passing options.
Thiago Silva has completed on average 64 passes p90 this season with a pass completion of 91%, in the game against us he had 58 passes with a 87% completion so this was also slightly lowered.
Jorginho on the other hand usually completes 60 passes p90 but against us he only completed 47 which is considerably less. So how did we limit passes to Jorginho so he in turn couldn’t dictate play like normal?
We weren’t as intense in our pressing as we have seen in other games, but we did do something a little different to try to deal with the threat Chelsea’s backline posed.
Firstly we didn’t press their central CB Thiago Silva often at all, we allowed him more time on the ball, instead we looked to limit the options available to the Brazil international knowing his passing quality was one of the best on the pitch.
As you can see in the above image, Thiago Silva has acres of space around him but every other player has a man close by or close enough to close them down, in particular note how close TR(Tyler Roberts) is to JO(Jorginho), he’s close to his man but also has an eye on TS(Thiago Silva)
Bielsa made sure that passes to the midfielders especially the Euro winning and Ballon d’Or nominated Italian were limited to try to limit his impact on the game, we certainly did limit his openplay effectiveness as he completed less passes than normal.
Also note that RJ(Reece James) shifted into midfield from his RWB position to give TS more options to pass to, but he too was closely followed by JH(Jack Harrison) who was playing LM.
Harrison’s keen man marking of James limited his impact too with him not completing any crosses and the total crosses he attempted was only 2 whereas normally he attempts double this at nearly 4p90 and his passing was also impacted, as normally he completes 58 passes p90 but in this game he only completed 38 which is a significant drop.
As I said previously we weren’t pressing as intensely in certain areas, most notably in midfield but when it came into wide areas we did press more intently, especially I noticed on Marcos Alonso, see in the below GIF.
We see in the above clip not a whole lot of pressure on the CM Loftus Cheek but as soon as the ball is played to Alonso at LWB we have two players on him and win the ball.
Overall in the game I felt our man to man marking was good, there was times where it wasn’t but I felt we did a good job in trying to limit the potential of Chelsea’s elite attacking lineup from damaging us. If you compare the total xG of the game they created 2.8xG to our 1.4xG. However if we remove penalties from this it comes down to 1.3npxG for them and 0.6 for us.
So while we didn’t create lots of good chances we did limit them to less than their average npxG, normally they create 1.6xG but in this game they put out 1.4 and also their xG per shot was down from 0.11npxG per shot to 0.10.
So while this isn’t much of a drop, it is still a drop and considering how badly hit our squad is with injuries and the obvious quality of their squad this should be seen as a strong achievement.
If we can continue this level of performance into the next tough games we have coming up we should at least get some points out of this tough run of fixtures.
All stats in this article were sourced from FBREF.com
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