Chelsea’s opener at the Emirates on 6 September came inside two minutes. Morgan Rogers half-volleyed a Reece James delivery low past David Raya.
By the 25th minute Kai Havertz had levelled it. Five minutes into the second half, Martin Odegaard had put Arsenal 2-1 up and Xabi Alonso had his first defeat as Chelsea manager.
Look across four matchdays and the Arsenal comeback is not a one-off. Chelsea’s Premier League record so far reads 3-2 at Fulham, 4-3 at home to Brighton, 1-2 at Arsenal, 2-2 at home to Hull City. Ten goals scored, nine conceded, and two or more against them in every single match.
They have not kept a league clean sheet in 20 matches, stretching back to January, and that is their longest such run in 65 years.
The blueprint Arsenal left behind
Two days after the Arsenal defeat, FourFourTwo’s Alex Keble argued that Alonso’s system, not his personnel, was the problem. The 3-4-3’s fatal flaw, he wrote, is a two-man midfield, and in theory a pair of attacking midfielders drops in to make a box of four against three.
Mikel Arteta inverted the plan. Riccardo Calafiori drifted infield from left-back, Havertz dropped off the front, and Arsenal built an “overwhelming five-on-two advantage in the middle” that cut through Chelsea repeatedly before yielding the winning goal. Odegaard’s finish came from a Havertz dummy on a Christos Tzolis pass, in exactly the pocket the drop-off created.
Alonso admits Chelsea were ‘too soft’
The Hull City draw six days later followed the same script. Jorrel Hato misjudged a cross for the visitors’ first goal, and a corner Chelsea did not clear became Mohamed Belloumi’s second. Chelsea led early through Rogers, but Belloumi’s two first-half goals put Hull ahead before Joao Pedro equalised for 2-2.
Alonso did not soften the assessment afterwards.
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“We were too soft for the equaliser. We can do much better.”
“We need to be more solid and be more controlled.”
At his pre-match press conference the day before, he had already framed the wider problem as balance.
“That’s the goal. This is the focus, this is the process that we want: to be more competitive, to be as good or even better in attack, because I think there is room for improvement, and to have the balance to feel solid and strong in defence. We don’t want to concede that many goals, and that’s the work of everyone, from the strikers to the goalkeeper.”
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Alonso’s four-year contract at Stamford Bridge was announced on 17 May and he formally took over on 1 July. Four league games in, he has yet to oversee a clean sheet.
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