Our first season under Antonio Conte has been one (so far) to savour. Barring disaster, Chelsea should wrap up the league title in the next couple of weeks. The club also
The club also have the FA Cup final to look forward to on 27 May against one of their closest rivals, Arsenal. This could become a double-winning season for Conte and he’d become amazingly the third Italian to complete this feat in the last 10 years at Chelsea.
Carlo Ancelotti won the Premier League & FA Cup double in his first season as a Chelsea manager in 2010. Two years later Roberto Di Matteo won the FA Cup & famously the Champions League in 2012. All sounds good, right? Well let’s hope so, but where do we go next is the big question, I’ve taken a look at where we can improve as a club this summer and which signings could hopefully prevent us suffering another disastrous title defence as we did last season.
One area of the side that has made the difference this season are both of our wing-backs, Victor Moses and Marcos Alonso. If you’d have told most Chelsea fans last season (including myself) that next season we will go on a 13 game winning streak starting a winger who has been on loan three out of the four seasons he’s been with the club, and a former Bolton & Sunderland defender in the respective wing-back positions you will have been well within your rights to laugh.
However, this has been a testament to Conte’s man-management abilities. He has finally found a way to exploit the obvious talents of Moses that brought him to the club in the first place and he has managed to find a system and team that elevates Alonso to one of Europe’s top left-sided defenders, something many fans & pundits would have questioned a year or so ago.
Proof of how vital these two have been to the side is that two out of the three defeats we’ve had playing the 3-4-3 system have been when Moses or Alonso have been absent from the side. It’s safe to say we don’t have a backup for either position who could class themselves as a designated wing back. The likes of Nathan Ake, Cesar Azpilicueta, Kurt Zouma & Pedro have all played a make-shift role in these positions, however with the rigorous game schedule next season this surely won’t suffice.
Also on a competitive level, although neither of the players have particularly dropped off performance-wise this season, there’s nobody pushing either of them out of the side which could bring an element of complacency into their performances as we all know too well after the horror show of 2015/2016 where a number of players felt their places in the side were nailed on, so let’s take a look at our options.
