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Chelsea’s blip goes on. After ending 2024 with successive Premier League defeats, Enzo Maresca’s side contrived to throw away a lead late on as Crystal Palace rallied to claim a draw at Selhurst Park.
It was the first time Chelsea had dropped points at this venue since the autumn of 2017, ending a run of six consecutive league wins across the capital.
Jadon Sancho’s sumptuous dummy, bamboozling Chris Richards, and cross had set up Cole Palmer for the opener early on and Chelsea should really have extended their lead by the break. Palace posed them more problems after the interval, but Maresca’s team could still have added a second. Pedro Neto was unlucky not to be awarded a penalty after a foul by Tyrick Mitchell, while Enzo Fernandez and Nicolas Jackson missed presentable chances.
They were made to pay for their profligacy as Palmer’s error presented possession back to Palace and Eberechi Eze squared for Jean-Philippe Mateta to equalise eight minutes from time, with the draw leaving Chelsea just a point above fifth-placed Newcastle in the table.
Liam Twomey dissects the main talking points from Selhurst Park.
How did Chelsea contrive not to win this?
Maresca said in his Friday press conference at Cobham that he did not need to see Chelsea lose back-to-back Premier League games against Fulham and Ipswich Town to know they are not ready to be title contenders, but the continuation of their winter stumble at Selhurst Park makes it seem all the more remarkable that they were so recently talked up as potential champions.
Each of their last four games (Everton, Fulham, Ipswich, Palace) has seen variations on similar themes: an attack that lacks ruthlessness and even imagination at key moments, a midfield that only offers control until it suddenly does not, and a defence that almost always finds a way to concede at least one goal.
Maresca has been open about the fact that he is searching for solutions. Here he scrapped the inverting full-back gambit entirely: Marc Cucurella and Malo Gusto were surprisingly conventional in their positioning but Enzo Fernandez remained far ahead of Moises Caicedo in midfield, leaving the Ecuador international with a lot of space to cover.
Chelsea did not struggle to create the chances to put Palace away and knitted together some scintillating combinations focused on Palmer and Sancho, but the visitors’ relatively open structure meant they were always vulnerable to fast transition attacks if Palace managed to win the ball back in the middle third.
That is exactly what happened for the equaliser. Palmer was the unlikely culprit, Gusto did not recover to reach Eze quickly enough as the England international surged into Chelsea’s penalty area, and the result was a Mateta tap-in, borne of two passes.
It should not be that easy to score against Chelsea but as long as it is, their attack will not always be able to bail out their leaky defence.
Mateta equalised late on for Palace (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
There may be more difficult assignments for a full Premier League debut than a match against a struggling Crystal Palace, but a London derby at Selhurst Park is also one of the more intimidating prospects — particularly for an academy youngster whose Chelsea future has been such a significant subplot in the first half of the season.
Acheampong, the ink barely dry on a new long-term contract signed last month, showed no signs of nerves or rust following a prolonged exile from match action late in 2024.
Whether by instinct or by design his passing was safer than that of centre-back partner Levi Colwill, but Acheampong was assured on the ball for most of a first half in which Palace struggled to put Chelsea under any sustained pressure. The second half was a different story and Jean-Philippe Mateta did succeed in harrying the 18-year-old into some slightly sloppier execution at times.
Acheampong was making his first senior start for Chelsea (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Chelsea did not pay a high price for any of Acheampong’s few errors, though, and he also rattled one excellent pass through the Palace lines into the feet of Palmer on the half-turn. There might even have been a goal to mark the occasion, but he could not quite connect cleanly with a Palmer corner that landed on his head at the back post.
Without the ball, he defended well enough in space against Mateta to suggest that he is worth a more extended look next to Colwill in the Premier League — particularly since Maresca is clearly unconvinced by his more established fit alternatives, Tosin Adarabioyo and Axel Disasi — and was not culpable at Palace’s late equaliser.
GO DEEPER
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Chelsea’s left flank: Was it a strength or a weakness?
As the two teams walked onto the Selhurst Park pitch ahead of kick-off the stadium announcer proclaimed Crystal Palace “the pride of South London”. It did not take long for Camberwell-born Sancho to show that he has designs on that particular title.
Sancho created Chelsea’s opening goal with a typically brilliant sequence of improvisational skill, leaving the unfortunate Richards in his wake with a sublime dummy and then beating the United States international again with a deft drop of the shoulder before squeezing the ball between two Palace defenders to Palmer, who supplied a clinical finish.
Sancho celebrates the opener with Palmer (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
When he is in this mood Sancho is a delight to watch, manufacturing opportunities to combine with team-mates using a level of creativity that few other players in the world possess. Many of Chelsea’s most dangerous attacking moments took the form of him freezing his defender, then finding an overlapping or underlapping runner with a perfectly timed and disguised pass.
But the left side of Maresca’s team was a weakness as well as a strength.
Tireless right wing-back Daniel Munoz is Palace’s biggest attacking threat, and in the first half Oliver Glasner’s team frequently took the opportunity to float long diagonal passes over the head of Marc Cucurella — which, given his size, is not that hard to do — towards the Colombian.
Sancho made one or two good recovery runs to track Munoz but those efforts were not consistent, leaving Cucurella to defend one-v-one too often. That is not the biggest strength in his game, and Palace’s likeliest route to goal throughout the match was an inviting cutback from the right side. Eberechi Eze will be haunted by one particular miss in the second half.
As with many other things in football, it is all about finding the balance. Chelsea’s left-sided combination of Sancho and Cucurella can be a real source of alternative creativity for this team, but it also offers Premier League opponents an obvious point to pick at defensively.
What did Enzo Maresca say?
We will bring you the Chelsea head coach’s thoughts after he has spoken at his post-match press conference.
Maresca watches on from the dug out (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
What next for Chelsea?
Saturday, January 11: Morecambe (H), FA Cup third round, 3pm GMT, 10am ET
The struggling League Two side visit Stamford Bridge, so will this be an opportunity for Marescsa to field his Conference League side and give his first-choice selection a breather?
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(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
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