It would seem as though players are dropping like flies at Chelsea at the moment as John Terry and Alex look be joining Frank Lampard and Yossi Benayoun to the list of long term casualties at Stamford Bridge. On top of that Michael Essien will miss the next two games courtesy of the straight red card he picked up in the game against Fulham.
We have every right as fans to be cursing our luck as it is of course extremely unfortunate, but are we paying the ultimate price for submitting such a small squad?
Carlo Ancelotti has one of the smallest squads in the Premier League with only 19 players over the age of 21 to choose from and although the calibre of young talent is better than it has been at Stamford Bridge in recent years, it is a lot to ask the likes of Josh McEachran and Gael Kakuta to bail you out of trouble.
During the summer the likes of Deco, Ricardo Carvalho, Michael Ballack, Juliano Belletti and Joe Cole went out of the doors at Stamford Bridge, with only Ramires and Yossi Benayoun coming the other way.
I understand that in the process of cost-cutting things have to change, but does it pay to change things so drastically in such a short space of time?
Fortunately the situation is one that is of course fixable, but the club will have to make several important decisions over the coming months which will shape the destiny of the club.
One of the things that should be attended to as soon as possible is bringing in the right man to replace Ray Wilkins in the assistant manager’s role (I imagine his departure was down to more cost cutting).
Secondly, if Carlo believes the kids are alright then he should play them. Paulo Ferreira was exposed in the centre back position against Sunderland and I would rather not see him play there again, it didn’t work for Jose Mourinho so it is unlikely to ever work out well. I don’t see any point in our supposed fourth choice centre half sitting on the bench, if we are not going to use Jeffrey Bruma then why isn’t he out on loan?
As a final measure the club will have to think long and hard whether they will dip into the January transfer market after seemingly not making the most of the last one as the club have now been left short of numbers. This of course would be expensive…ironically enough.
Let’s hope that Carlo and the club can resolve the issues and stop a bad situation from getting worse.
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