Chelsea play Ipswich tonight, and they need to get one very important stat back on track.
They drew against Everton because they couldn’t find the net to make it 1-0. The lost against Fulham because they couldn’t score a goal to make it 2-0 and seal the game, allowing the Whites to turn the result around.
After a season where they’ve scored freely, they went tight in front of goal in two winnable games and walked away with 1 point instead of 6. They can’t let it happen again tonight. Following the draw with Arsenal at the end of November, the Blues had been on a great run in attack terms.
They won 8 games in a row, and only in one of those 8 games did they produce fewer than 2 xG – and that was in a game against Aston Villa where they had two first half goals and barely needed to break a sweat.
However the last two games have seen the Blues put up just 1.1 xG and 1.2 xG. Create that few chances and bad results are what you should expect.
Chelsea must get attackers firing and scoring – and tonight is perfect chance
They need to get back into gear tonight, and we expect changes along the front 3 to get them into gear. But in the end it will come down to players in front of goal – we had chances to win both our last games and bottled them.
Ipswich are 19th and have shown plenty of vulnerability at the back. Noni Madueke, Joao Felix and Christopher Nkunku should all be playing tonight with a serious point to prove, and they each have the attacking ability to find the net. If they can’t get the job done tonight, they can hardly claim they deserve to replace the current first team incumbents.
