Senegal keeper Edouard Mendy joined Chelsea because of the horrid display of Spanish goalkeeper, Kepa Arrizabalaga. Since the start of the 2020-21 season, his performance has become increasingly bad and even more painful to witness.
Just when everyone thought it couldn’t get any worse, Kepa again lowered the bar so much that pundits claim that he has registered himself officially as Chelsea’s third-choice keeper.
Kepa did a howler since the league opener and it has occurred back to back in games leaving the fans and the coach frustrated. This has occurred in the previous season too and that is the prime reason why Edouard Mendy was signed in the summer.
During Southampton’s second goal, when the camera focussed on the Spaniard’s face, his look seemed very down with confidence, completely of anguish and pain. It was as if someone from a humorous blooper video that came out in the late ’90s.
His condition seems so pathetic that you would want to start some sort of online relief fund to help him terminate his Chelsea contract and send him to some new club for his sake as well as the club. It is evident that his career in Stamford Bridge is now very difficult to flourish again.
His huge decline for Chelsea has reached to such a point that it goes beyond Chelsea’s over-valuing of his ability when he was playing in La Liga. Although the scouts of Premier League didn’t refer to him as the next Garrincha, neither do they thought that he will become the fourth-worst player in North Caledonian Football.
But this has never been the case in reality. Kepa is still Spain’s first-choice keeper over David De Gea and had a decent game against a recent fixture where he played against the might Portugal in Nation’s League.
The Spaniard earned 23 clean sheets for Chelsea this season before Lampard joined. Last season under their Blues’ coach, he had 10 clean sheets. But what happened to Kepa, the world-class young talent now not even the fraction of the worth in a span of 2 years!
But this drastic drop in form is more than just a bad form theory. It is ridiculous to think how a keeper being world-class at such a tender age has become a bang average keeper under Lampard only. The sad reality is that he is now a scapegoat for the coach’s inability, an easy dummy target between the sticks.
Frank Lampard himself says that the team is full of mistakes, especially in the defensive department. But it distracts us from the fact that it has been his inability to fix such a situation having stayed more than a season with the club.
In the Southampton match, Kepa Arrizabalaga got the chance to feature and a valuable defence was picked up. There is little to no reason to complain about having a lack of players to select in the backline.
Andreas Christensen could have been improved and Zouma has been good and pretty solid even beside Thiago Silva. Also, let’s not forget that the Blues boast of having the best holding midfielders of the Premier League protecting the defence line.
The individual errors occurring here and there at various intervals of the game are so regular that you start questioning the manager. This reveals the lack of direction provided by the boss as well as a total system failure whose roots are the manager himself. But the Blues were seduced by the sentiments of the fans that they dared not to look beyond that. the blame is not upon the board as they have gone through so many managerial changes over the last few seasons.
This has to be kept in mind that undoubtedly there is space for emotions and sentiments for club legends. But it is the system that is key to success and Lampard has until now truly failed to give that in Chelsea.
