At half-time in the Stamford Bridge press room it felt like a live question: Did that Chelsea showing make you more or less confident that they will win the Conference League?
Zero shot attempts, on or off target, from the home side in the first 45 minutes. Startlingly little football of any kind played over the halfway line. Half-hearted pressing, hapless passing. Copenhagen comfortable in their own defensive third and increasingly confident moving the ball nearer to the Chelsea goal, their notorious defensive line of five frequently becoming a line of three as their wing-backs surged upfield, untracked by Chelsea’s wingers.
It is reasonable to wonder if any team could maintain genuine ambitions of winning a tournament while showing so little. Yet in spite of it all, there was no sense of real jeopardy.
Chelsea were harassed into errors in their own defensive third by Copenhagen’s aggressive press but Filip Jorgensen was never seriously tested. Standing in his technical area, Enzo Maresca frequently betrayed annoyance at what he was seeing, but never genuine fear that a quarter-final place was at risk.
Chelsea were rarely at risk against Copenhagen on Thursday night (Warren Little/Getty Images)
This game, perhaps more than any other that Chelsea have played in the Conference League, exposed just how huge their margin for error is against this calibre of opposition.
Copenhagen are an above average team for this level, and regular European participants. According to Transfermarkt their squad value this season is €77.6million, the fifth-highest in the Conference League. They are also well coached by Jacob Neestrup, who equipped them with a smart game plan for both legs of this round of 16 tie.
None of it was enough to lay a glove on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge — even this version of Chelsea, well below full strength and well below par for 45 minutes. Maresca recognised the need to show the Stamford Bridge crowd something in the second half, dusting off Cole Palmer and Marc Cucurella at the interval. A threat immediately materialised and within 10 minutes Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall had wriggled through three tackles to score the game’s only goal.
For the rest of the match Chelsea weathered Copenhagen’s increasingly desperate attacks with minimal defensive effort and counter-attacked at their leisure.
By the end they had still managed to generate more total shots (11) and attempts on target (five) than their Danish visitors, who called Jorgensen into action only once. Maresca was able to manage the minutes of most of his key players ahead of Sunday’s massive Premier League clash with Arsenal, and the only intrigue in the last half-hour sprang from wondering whether Palmer would take one of several presentable chances to break his scoring duck.
Chelsea would not get away with being this poor against almost any Premier League side. They did not get away with it away at Brighton and Hove Albion in the fourth round of the FA Cup last month. After that 2-1 defeat, Maresca riled many supporters by citing as a “positive” that elimination at the Amex Stadium would allow his team to focus on the Premier League and Conference League. No such trade-offs should be required in this competition.
The mere fact that Chelsea are in the Conference League is a quirky distortion of Europe’s modern football and financial order. According to Transfermarkt, their squad value (€928.5million) is more than three times the second-highest (Fiorentina, €280.8million) in the competition and more than five times the third-highest (Real Betis, €164.95million).
Both of those teams are in the other half of the bracket that leads to the Conference League final in Wroclaw on May 28. Football is not played on a balance sheet but it is no exaggeration or disrespect to suggest that only a self-inflicted catastrophe of gargantuan proportions can prevent Chelsea from reaching that final and, once there, complacency and sloppiness may be bigger threats to Maresca’s hopes of lifting the trophy than the opposition.
Maresca is able to rotate for the Conference League (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
Can they win the whole thing without ever clicking out of first gear? Probably not. But on the evidence of this tie they should be able to walk rather than run most of the road to Wroclaw and that reality, beyond being an absurd luxury to have in any competition, should be quietly comforting for Maresca as he navigates the final stretch of a hotly contested race for the Champions League qualification spots in the Premier League.
Chelsea sit fourth in the table with 10 matches to go but according to Opta’s supercomputer, they have only a 36 per cent chance of finishing there. That is because their run-in is rated as the third-hardest in the division; beyond the trip to Arsenal and home tussle with bitter rivals Tottenham that bookend the March international break, their final four opponents of the season are Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester United and Nottingham Forest.
The projection for a top-five finish — which should be enough to bring Champions League football back to Stamford Bridge in 2025-26, given the strength of the Premier League’s UEFA coefficient — is more promising: Chelsea’s chances of finishing fifth or higher sit at 57.6 per cent. But it is clear that as well as being Maresca’s top priority, securing enough Premier League points for Champions League qualification will require all the energy and quality that Chelsea’s best players can muster in the final two-and-a-half months of the campaign.
Chelsea as a club — though admittedly not this ownership, squad or coach — have known situations a little like this before. Both of their Europa League-winning campaigns (2012-13 and 2018-19) did not require serious exertion until the semi-final stage. There are no teams remotely as good as Benfica or Arsenal in this year’s Conference League, and possibly not even any as dangerous as semi-final opponents Basel or Eintracht Frankfurt were then.
Maresca’s team selection for both legs of the round of 16 tie against Copenhagen indicates he is fully aware of that, and that he will not allow Chelsea’s continental adventure to run any risk of damaging their chances of achieving the target the club values most.
Nothing the Conference League has thrown at Chelsea so far suggests he will need to.
(Top photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
