In my humble opinion, this week presents Chelsea and Thomas Tuchel with a perfect opportunity to test out a new formation.
We have been hearing for some time now that Tuchel is keen to switch to a back four as his main setup for Chelsea moving forward, yet he hasn’t had the personnel to really adapt to it. We’ve seen him use variations of a 4-2-2-2 last season, but I really want to see a 4-3-3 moving forward once we have the right players to play it.
Chelsea don’t really have a traditional style defensive midfielder at the moment, a player who will sit in front of the back four and screen the defence, allowing those ahead of him to create and attack.
Of course, Tuchel as always, will want to be able to be flexible with his formations and use a different number of them during a season depending on who the opposition is. But I’d love to see a 4-3-3 as mainstay, and this Thursday morning in our second pre-season game against Charlotte, we have the perfect opportunity to test it.
If you aren’t going to test it in pre-season, then when will you test it? And also, in Ethan Ampadu, Chelsea do now have the style DM that I mentioned above, having played there for Wales on a number of occasions as well as with loan clubs.
I’d love to see Chelsea line up in a 4-3-3 this week and test it out at least. Let’s see if it works, or what we need to make it work.
