Chelsea excite vs Arsenal but Rosenior's High Performance ceiling no higher than Maresca's

A first home game after being appointed head coach on a six-year deal and it was a major cup semi-final against the Premier League and Champions League leaders, short of his three best players in Cole Palmer, Moises Caicedo and Reece James, with illness ravaging his squad besides. It was a “dream” which could so easily have become a nightmare for Liam Rosenior.

A tenure which has so far featured the 5-1 battering of Charlton in the FA Cup third round and seemingly endless press conference soundbites your GQ-subscribing middle-aged men will have parroted to their comrades in All Bar One on Saturday night was given its first test against Arsenal and Mikel Arteta, who’s earned the right among the English football-supporting cynics to be the eccentric guy you would actively avoid to engage in conversation down the pub.

Rosenior is a long way off being afforded that leeway, and incredibly looks as though he has further to go than the pickpocket-hiring Gunners boss who insists there’s always more juice to squeeze from a lemon.

The mind boggles as to what Rosenior is saying to his players behind closed doors if his public belief is that “manage” is a combination of “man” and “age” and his job therefore behoves him to age his men. Christ.

But he can watch as many self-improvement Instagram reels as he likes and start his day at 3am for all we care, as long as his methods lead to a tangible improvement in Chelsea.

It won’t be clear if Rosenior can achieve his primary goal this season of appearing on both the High Performance and Diary of a CEO podcasts qualifying for the Champions League until he has his best players at his disposal, but this was a game to illustrate what all but the BlueCo chiefs and multifarious directors at Stamford Bridge believe to be the problem: Chelsea have no hope of doing anything of note until they fix the glaring issues in the squad.

READ MORE: Predicting the next manager of every club from Arsenal to Fulham – who gets Amorim and Maresca?

Robert Sanchez – who has in fairness been far better this season than last, low bar though that was – flapped at Arsenal’s first corner to gift Ben White a simple header to open the scoring, and then made an even worse error to hand Viktor Gyokeres a chance even he couldn’t miss, allowing White’s low cross to squeeze through both hands and straight into the path of the goal-shy striker.

The lack of a goalscorer to match the quality Chelsea had on the wings in Pedro Neto and Estevao, in the No.10 spot in João Pedro and behind him in Enzo Fernandez and Andrey Santos was more evident than usual as Liam Delap’s illness saw £5m man Marc Guiu start up top. He did his running and battling bit but little else as the Blues created ‘moments’ in attack in the first half but didn’t carry the threat they could, should and would do if signed a high class No.9.

Martin Zubimendi’s body feint and finish was brilliant. But the space he was afforded in the box by Chelsea was absurd, and that, along with the three changes Rosenior made to his back four during this game, points to another grim reality that he will face as Maresca did: All of his centre-backs – aside perhaps from the injured Levi Colwill – are good but not great.

But there were plenty of positives for Rosenior, whose side didn’t reach the “high-tempo, aggressive, front-foot” level he’s after consistently, but did display all of those qualities to score their opening goal.

Having pounced on a poor touch from Martin Odegaard, Enzo Fernandez won two 50-50 challenges before Pedro Neto’s cross from the right found Alejandro Garnacho at the back post. There was no notable celebration from Rosenior as Garnacho fired his shot under Kepa Arrizabalaga, though we’re sure he would welcome questions as to why he felt the need to introduce the goalscorer just four minutes before. We wonder if there’s a more Jake Humphrey-esque term than ‘finisher’ he could coin to extol the virtues of his substitutes?

Anyway, the Chelsea clincher – desperate to smear egg all over one particularly foolish journalist’s face – then scored again as Rosenior got his wish in seeing “fans out of their seats”, and while there wasn’t quite “wave after wave” of attacks, certainly not if we’re discounting Arsenal in making their fair share of surges, the last half hour of this game made for a more exciting watch than the vast majority of the games we saw and all too often endured under Maresca.

He may be as good or even slightly better than his predecessor. The young, presumably mouldable players at Chelsea may well react positively to what will be horrendously cringeworthy and gear-grinding chat from him for the rest of us.

But Rosenior’s ceiling will be dictated by those making decisions off the pitch and we strongly suspect that ceiling won’t be any higher than what Maresca bumped his head on at Stamford Bridge.

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