Long after he’d poked home the match-winning goal, Alvaro Morata snuck out of the stadium with his head bowed and an ice pack pressed against his split lip, a relic of his running battle with Vidi captain Roland Juhasz and a neat picture of the kind of night he endured.
“We are not here to take photos and enjoy ourselves,” Juhasz had warned before kick-off. “We are here to fight.” The Hungarian champions did exactly that and turned what should have been a routine night for the Spanish striker into a wild odyssey of battered bones and bruised confidence until his late redemption.
On the surface it was a performance that spluttered, one where the various cogs in Maurizio Sarri’s machine uncomfortably clunked together, where Eden Hazard had to be called upon earlier than anyone expected, and where a 1-0 lead was only narrowly preserved in the final minutes thanks to a brilliant reflex save by Kepa Arrizabalaga.
Yet the bigger picture was that Chelsea took control of their Europe League group and in doing so injected a little confidence into a struggling striker. Morata spent the first 70 minutes looking like a man for whom “football” was a new fad he was trying out, yet by the end he was the hero of the piece with a goal which Maurizio Sarri believes could reboot his season...
Sarri has treated the gap between the first international break and the second which kicks in next week as a kind of pre-season, a chance to assess as many of his players as possible and see who cottons on to his demands. Some are clearly on the fringes, like Danny Drinkwater, while it is a surprise youngsters like Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ethan Ampadu haven’t had more opportunities after impressing in actual pre-season, but Sarri has been able to keep most of his squad involved and has developed a seemingly harmonious camp.
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