Chelsea make the journey to Ipswich for our next Premier League game on Monday night this week as the busy festive period continues and we play our final match of 2024.
After two poor performances in my opinion, we need to see a bit of a bounce back in this game, but it’s not going to be easy despite the home side being almost a dead cert for relegation at this point and to drop right back down to the championship which let’s be honest, is their level.
Those who watched Arsenal beat Ipswich on Friday night will know exactly what to expect. It will be a high possession game again for Chelsea, and Ipswich will be looking for that smash and grab, exactly what Fulham did to us in our last match and what Everton tried to do too.
Ipswich reduced Arsenal to 13 attempts on their goal, with 5 of them being on target. They also had 69% possession. Ipswich had an abysmal just 3 attempts on Arsenal’s goal, which is absolutely terrible.
I expect to see the much of the same really on Monday night and the onus will be on Chelsea to create and finish chances, which we absolutely should be doing against this side.
Liam Delap has a goal in him, we know that, and he will be auditioning directly in front of Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca in this game. The Italian paid Delap some big compliments last night. But the Chelsea target is going to have to feed off scraps, even if he gets those to be honest. His job will be to chase and hassle from the front, but I don’t expect that to be too intense of a press.
Chelsea are seriously looking into signing Delap and as reported some weeks back now on here, contact has been made to both player and club from Chelsea as an initial enquiry. His club obviously do not want to sell him in January, but for the summer he is 100% a striker high on Chelsea’s list of targets.
Chelsea have been scouting him this season but it’s so tough for him because he is fighting a losing battle playing for such a poor side and gets to see hardly any of the ball.
Let’s be honest, Chelsea need to be going there and getting all three points on Monday night regardless. And I believe we will too.
I’d expect to see some changes and we could see Noni Madueke return to the starting lineup after some poorer performances from Jadon Sancho in particular, and even Pedro Neto in the Fulham game. Madueke has been punished for a string of behaviour related incidents and not putting enough effort in to training, but Maresca confirmed that he has taken the punishment well and I don’t foresee any further squad omissions for now.
Tosin Adarabioyo was poor in the last game but I suspect will go again for this one in the continued absence of Wesley Fofana. The rest I think picks itself until we get more of our injured players back.
I truly hope all my comments about Delap having to feed off scraps do not come back to bite me, but that’s on us. We have to break them down and score, and I want to see more ideas and plans to do that this game. Maresca needs to step up a bit here too.
