Chelsea may never concede again

Lord of the clean sheets

Chelsea haven’t conceded a league goal in over a month, not since the first half of their 3-0 loss away at Arsenal on Sept. 24. That’s a long time without conceding a goal — 585 minutes, to be exact — long enough to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, including a couple of 15 minute breaks in between films. Also long enough to turn the Blues into second favorites for the title, behind Manchester City.

Tottenham still own the league’s best defensive record, having conceded eight goals in 12 matches, but Chelsea have now kept two more clean sheets. There’s also the fact the Blues conceded five of the nine goals they’ve allowed in only two matches, losses against Arsenal and Liverpool, which means they’ve conceded four in 10 against everyone else they’ve played, and zero since Antonio Conte switched to a 3-4-3 in the second half of that loss to Arsenal. Whichever way you slice it, that’s mighty impressive.

Even so, Aitor Karanka’s Middlesbrough gave Chelsea the toughest test of their current winning/clean sheet streak by combining a sporadic but effective pressing game, some diligent defending with 10 men behind the ball, an acceptance of the necessity of fouling Chelsea’s key attacking players (particularly Eden Hazard) when necessary and a willingness, by accident or design, to give Victor Moses a boat load of space on the right wing while deliberately attacking the space behind him. Moses has had an excellent season so far, but given a choice of attacking poisons, it makes sense for opponents to pick him ahead of Hazard, Diego Costa and Pedro.

Boro didn’t create many good chances, but they got behind Chelsea in a way we haven’t really seen since the switch to a back three. They were wasteful on a couple of occasions and lacked quality in others (*cough* Gaston Ramirez *cough*), but they posed genuine problems.

I’ve been saying for much of the past month that we should wait until 3-4-3 Chelsea have played Tottenham and Manchester City (their next two opponents) to make any definitive judgments, but I no longer think it matters. As it stands, of all the main challengers (City, Liverpool, Arsenal and we’ll throw Tottenham and Manchester United in there, too) the Blues appear best suited to beating the teams they should. They’ve lost their only two matches this season to other would-be title contenders, and are top of the league anyway.

Liverpool, though probably not as bad defensively as many make them seem, give up good chances at a rate that always threatens to burn them if they have an off day up front (see: Burnley, but also see: Swansea, West Brom). City have a less exaggerated version of the same problem, Arsenal are still Arsenal, and therefore can’t be trusted not to have a total mental breakdown until they go a whole season without having a total mental breakdown, Tottenham’s attack has been mostly terrible this season (Harry Kane’s return from injury could fix that problem, but given the way they were playing before his injury, that’s no guarantee) and United may have already slipped far enough behind the leaders (nine points) that any improvement will be irrelevant as far as the title goes.

All of which is to say, whatever happens between the top six this season, Chelsea look like the side most well-equipped to pick up maximum points against the league’s bottom two thirds. Whoever wins the title is, at this rate, going to have to pick up a lot of points to do it. Arsenal, currently fourth, are on pace to finish with 76 points, which means the eventual winners will probably have to come close to, or even top, 90.

There are 84 points up for grabs from the bottom 14 teams. Against those teams, Chelsea have so far collected 28 out of 30 possible points. Liverpool have managed 19 from 24, City 24 from 30 and Arsenal 20 from 24.

If those records hold for the rest of the season (and there’s not guarantee they will — as bottom half teams become more or less desperate for survival, they become easier or harder opposition, which means the fixture list will likely end up being kinder for some of the top four than for others), Chelsea seem like a good bet to finish as champions, regardless of their performance against the top six.

If the formula that has led them on this six-game winning streak proves successful against Tottenham and Manchester City in the coming weeks, Chelsea will seem like an even better bet to finish as champions.

Weekly Awards

The Kolo Toure Award for Silliness: Simone Zaza

Simone Zaza arrived at West Ham this summer the butt of a joke about the silliest penalty taken in a history littered with silly penalties. His performances have not done much to make that seem unwarranted. Zaza has not exactly been bad for the Hammers, though he has yet to score a single goal and has managed only two shots on target in five appearances. He’s shown a willingness to get involved, an eagerness to convince us all he cares. And yet in the process of all this caring, he has accomplished almost precisely nothing. He seems, rather, to be trapped in a constant state of limbo, always a step too slow to really be classified as putting himself about, but just as always, and even more noticeably, heading in that general direction. Simone Zaza is not a graceful man, but there’s something compelling about his willingness to close down any defender at any time, regardless of the location of his teammates. His brief substitute appearance against Tottenham on Saturday captured this perfectly, as he flung himself wildly in the direction of every defender he could find, all while his team turned three points to zero in two of the silliest minutes of the Premier League season so far.

The Juan Roman Riquelme Award for Nutmegs: Mesut Ozil

Antonio Valencia very nearly won this award for what he did to Nacho Monreal on the edge of Arsenal’s box on Saturday, but Monreal was savvy enough not only to foul Valencia but also to get away with it, meaning the meg was never complete, and therefore won’t stand. Mesut Ozil, in contrast, nutmegged Michael Carrick so nonchalantly I found a moment to wonder, as the ball passed quietly between the Englishman’s legs, whether Ozil was even real. Then I saw Carrick, the head-tilt of despair as he wheeled around to try and find Ozil again, and I knew Ozil was in fact very real, and so was the ball he had lately nudged through Carrick’s legs and picked up again on the other side, like Poohsticks on grass.

The Louis Saha Award for Underrated Finishing: James Morrison

There was some great finishing this week. Roberto Pereyra scored a beauty against Leicester, Victor Anichebe, back from the dead, put Hull to the sword with two powerful finishes, Juan Mata was clinical with a first-time shot against Arsenal, Yaya Toure roofed one against Crystal Palace and Seamus Coleman scored the most excruciatingly well-placed header you may ever see. But Morrison comes out on top for a wonderful side-footed effort against Burnley. He took it so early, so precisely, so subtly that the ball appeared to have passed Tom Heaton, arguably the goalie of the season so far, before he could fully process what was happening. It was easy to overlook Morrison’s finish amid the shower of incompetence that was that Burnley performance, but it was a beautiful goal.

The Nigel Pearson Award for It Couldn’t Have Happened To A Nicer Guy: Alan Pardew

There’s been a lot going on around the relegation zone this season, what with West Ham and Stoke unexpectedly finding themselves in the mix and Hull doing very strange and erratic things on a weekly a basis and David Moyes squinting ever more aggressively and Swansea serenely drifting into nothingness. But anyway, Crystal Palace are now 16th, one point from the drop, having not won a match since Sept. 18, and having lost five in a row. It seems almost pointless saying it, but Palace have a lot of good players — Christian Benteke, Yohan Cabaye, Scott Dann, Damien Delaney, Wilfried Zaha, Andros Townsend — but they’re reeling. Kyle Martino had a nice bit in the NBC studio when he suggested Alan Pardew’s eternal self-confidence might be hurting this squad, and I respected Martino for that, because he seemed then to be such a good person it hadn’t even occurred to him to put that the other, more accurate way: Pardew’s smuggery has become so thick as to render all intelligent life forms in his immediate vicinity brain dead, which is the only explanation I can come up with to explain how the worst set piece Kevin De Bruyne has ever taken turned into a match-winning tap-in for Yaya Toure.

The Graham Poll Award for Extremely Bad Refereeing: Roger East

Being a ref is hard. There’s a lot going on at a very high speed and most of the time several thousand people are verbally abusing you while you try to do your job. But also sometimes being a ref isn’t that hard, like when Ryan Shawcross took out Callum Wilson in Stoke’s box on Saturday. There were no shades of grey, no competing interpretations, no obstructed vision, just one player kicking another in such a way that made him fall over. A foul, in short. Luckily for East, Bournemouth ended up winning, so his ridiculous decision meant very little in the end.