Collapse at Arsenal sums up Chelsea’s deathly, pointless celebrity product

It lives. It breathes. Those drooping limbs have bloomed with new life. There will be time, additionally, for the most startling element of this past due season knockabout at the Emirates, the extraordinary, zombified spectacle currently operating as Chelsea Football Club.

Before that the headlines will rightly be approximately Arsenal, on a night while their personal seemingly doomed identify push thrust a fist up thru the turf and dragged itself again up on to its it feet. A 3-1 win way that Arsenal at the moment are points clean on the pinnacle of the league, albeit having performed two suits greater than a Manchester City group that appears to win games these days without a doubt by turning up and pointing itself vaguely within the proper direction. Arsenal had been peppy and busy and complete of clever angles for as lengthy because it changed into important to be any of those matters, which wasn’t very long in any respect.For the home supporters and the manager this sport wasn’t virtually about this season, not absolutely besides. The games that continue to be are greater approximately confirming that this group is actual, that the energy and the structures will certainly be there next yr, that something of substance has been created, not just a single-season apparition.Mikel Arteta’s team duly tore into Chelsea. Martin Ødegaard changed into impossible to resist inside the beginning 20 minutes, tucked in between the lines and continually in a state of rotation, body angled to the bypass, a footballer who become born on the 1/2‑flip.

But below this spectacle there has been some other object of deep fascination right here. In the midst of existence we are in death. Silence please, for one of the fullest expressions to date of Chelsea’s own complex and at times pretty chilling experience of carrying entropy. Everyone is aware of Chelsea are bad. Defeat here made it six on the reel for Frank Lampard, the head coach with extra Ls than Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Chelsea have spent greater than another membership in Europe, and are actually stage on factors with a crew whose supervisor took one look at his squad in early season and suddenly left.

But it isn’t just this. It is alternatively the way Chelsea are terrible. What is that this thing, parading throughout the stage within the weeds of Chelsea FC, eyes blazing with useless electricity, a skinny hand clamped for your wrist, leaning in to inform its story of stolen adolescents and wasted days, idle as a painted deliver on a painted ocean?Freud said that the idea of all horror stories is an uncertainty as to whether an entity is lifeless or alive. And fair play to the boy Sigmund, he quite lots referred to as it. This Chelsea iteration is what soccer might have appeared like within the invite-most effective Super League, now not so much a team as a deathly and unnecessary movie star product. Let’s have an all-star recreation. Let’s hoard all the cash to buy all the gamers. Let’s flex our fangs and wring every last drop of revenue out of this factor right now. Let’s kill and flow on.

Chelsea’s starting XI was at least exciting and disruptive and bizarre, which seem to be the features the possession admires most. Here is a Kremlin-technology stalwart, right here a supermarket-sweep oddity, a few casino-chip players, a few purchase‑one‑get‑one‑frees.

At kick‑off the air in the Emirates Stadium had became a lovable cool powder blue. And Arsenal were smooth and slick and full of that acquainted precision fury early on. The opening goal came from a total crumble of resistance. Granit Xhaka had time to pea-roll a low bobbly move thru the Chelsea penalty place, close to a few players in blue who regarded mesmerised through this rolling white orb. Ødegaard become left free to use the entire force of his left foot, sending it excessive into the net beyond Kepa Arrizabalaga’s clasping hand.