Forget Frank Lampard. José Mourinho may not have been expecting the former Chelsea stalwart to pitch up at Manchester City after leaving Stamford Bridge in the summer but the outcome of Sunday’s match between the two favourites for the Premier League title is likely to depend more on a signing that raised Mourinho’s eyebrows even higher – Cesc Fàbregas.
“I thought he was going to stay at Barcelona,” says Mourinho, who is grateful but somewhat mystified that Fàbregas was available at a time when natural erosion seemed to be weakening the Catalans’ midfield. “I was looking at him as the natural successor of this generation of Barcelona players who were getting older, like Xavi. The surprise for me was not that he didn’t go to Arsenal but that he was actually leaving Barcelona.”
Under the terms of the transfer that had taken Fàbregas from London to the Camp Nou in 2011, Arsenal had the right of first refusal if Barcelona ever decided to sell the player, but Arsène Wenger decided against a reunion with his former captain. So the path was clear for Chelsea to pick up a proven elite midfielder for a fraction more than the £25m that Liverpool paid Southampton for Adam Lallana – a bit puzzling but a no-brainer for Chelsea.
Fàbregas has got into the groove immediately, helping Chelsea to swagger through their first four league matches. He has woven his team together and contributed an assist in each of those games, showing an instant understanding not only with the club’s other major recruit, the striker Diego Costa, but with all of his new team-mates. There is no surprise there. Fàbregas is a supremely intelligent player with an innate ability to spot a killer pass, as exemplified by his brilliant set-up for André Schürrle in Chelsea’s win at Burnley in their opening match of the season.
It was seven years ago that Wenger said Fàbregas had qualities akin to one of the finest playmakers of all time – Michel Platini. Fàbregas has evolved impressively since then and Mourinho reckons he has returned to the Premier League at his prime. “He’s 27 years old, I think it’s the perfect age,” he says. “[He is] physically on a high, mentally very stable, [and has a] tactical education in different contexts.”
Gary Neville said on Sky this week that Fàbregas’s one flaw is a tendency to go chasing the ball at the expense of team shape, meaning that, while he is an outstanding offensive midfielder, he makes teams vulnerable when he is one of only two central midfielders. Mourinho disagrees. “One of the reasons he’s so important for us is exactly because he can play in any position,” he says. “Even in Barcelona he was playing so many times as a nine – their style of nine. He sometimes was playing on the left wing too. He can play in many positions. It depends what you want. What is your plan? Where do you think he can be or have more influence on the game?”
So what will be Mourinho’s plan at City? Neville said Fàbregas is likely to be deployed as part of a three-man central midfield, perhaps with Ramires and Nemanja Matic performing the bulk of break-up work, as they did in the second-half of the win over Swansea after Mourinho withdrew Schürrle.
Manuel Pellegrini must be pondering a similar issue, and it will likely seem more pressing to him given how flimsy the normally dominant Yaya Touré has been so far this season. If Fàbregas sometimes leaves Chelsea vulnerable, then Touré has been a liability to City on occasions this season, notably in the midweek Champions League defeat by Bayern Munich. The notion that City should go into their most important contests of the season so far without their best player from last term might seem perverse but Touré’s meagre contributions in the early days of this campaign mean the manager must be seriously considering it, especially given how comprehensively Matic subdued Touré in this fixture last season, which the Ivorian had gone into in fine form.
If Touré does start – and it would certainly be understandable if Pellegrini elected to keep faith with a player of such enormous quality - it will likely be in an advanced role in front of two central midfielders and at the cost of either dropping David Silva or shifting the Spaniard farther wide. The result of the match could come down to who manages to exert more influence: will it be Touré, the best midfielder in last season’s Premier League, or Fàbregas, the man most likely to take his crown?
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