Chelsea's 2024 is starting to look a bit like their 2023

Losing to Middlesbrough in the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg is recoverable, but the first leg showed a Chelsea team as incapable of recovery as ever.

So, the Premier League’s season of inconsistency strikes again, then. It had started to feel as though Chelsea had started to turn a corner, of sorts. Their wins against Crystal Palace and Fulham offered little to get over-excited about, but they were at least wins, a little release valve for the pressure cooker that has built up around Mauricio Pochettino since he took the job in the summer. A 4-0 win against Preston North End in the FA Cup offered further evidence of some degree of movement towards some sort of end goal.

But then came their Carabao Cup semi-final first leg at Middlesbrough, where a 1-0 defeat seems to have cracked all those old wounds back open again. A goal from Hayden Hackney—we’re at the point of having to Google these names one by one, because it can feel at times as though they’re part of some sort of elaborate joke—was enough to win the game, with Cole Palmer missing a couple of golden opportunities to bring them level.

Of course, the reality of the situation is nowhere near the calamitous levels that the caterwauling on social media after this match would have you believe, because that would be impossible. There’s still a second leg to be played at Stamford Bridge, and against Championship opposition Chelsea will probably start that match as favourites to get through to the Wembley final. But in a season that seems to have largely been about them making things as difficult as they can for themselves, Chelsea struck again last night with a performance as limp and insipid as any we’ve seen from them this season.

Their quarter-final win on penalty kicks against Newcastle United hadn’t been much to write home about, but it did at least offer them the possibility of salvaging something from the wreckage of a multiple train pile-up of a season. But even though Chelsea will still be expected to win the second leg of this tie, after a first leg like that the atmosphere will now crackle that little bit louder in the return match. Everybody will be a little more on edge than they would otherwise have been. And if they don’t win it, the bloodlust levels will surely only rise even higher.

It might well be argued that they are lucky that this defeat came in the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup, a stage of a competition which allows for do-overs. There’s a pretty solid case for arguing that, if there was a match that could do with being axed from the current schedule, it’s the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-finals, the very existence of which is a hangover from the days when the entire tournament was played over two legs. Rationality has won the day over the rest of this competition, but the second leg of the semi-finals persists, like the appendix of the football season. Had this been the FA Cup, there would have been no second chances.

Furthermore, this wasn’t even really a full strength Middlesbrough team which beat them. At kick off, Boro manager Michael Carrick was already missing twelve of his first team squad. By the end of the match, with Emmanuel Latte Lath and Alex Bangura having both limped off with injuries, that number had risen to fourteen. These injuries have already had their effect on Middlesbrough’s season. They went into this semi-final having won just five of their last thirteen league matches, going back to the end of October.

Chelsea themselves started the evening with ten missing, but the elephant in this particular room is the amount of money that they’ve frittered away on players over the last year and a half. Fans will argue among themselves over exactly how high this amount, but we can say this much with certainty: it’s a damn sight more than Middlesbrough have ever had to spend on new players. When you spend more than a billion pounds on new players in a relatively short period of time, complaining over injuries starts to lose some of its lustre.

But the questions remain and the buck continues to rest with the manager, and even though it probably wouldn’t make any sense to offload Pochettino as a bad job and replace him, that doesn’t mean that the subject is off the table. All this happening in January means that there will be calls for even more money to be spent, most likely on a new striker, but focusing on a new manager and a new striker feels like simplistic answers to what may well be an extremely complex questions, and that’s without factoring in the FFP implications of dropping a nine-figure sum on the sort of player that they appear to feel entitled.

The manager question is even more prickly. It’s all very well, reflexively reaching for the pitchforks whenever the team loses a match, but the practicalities of bringing in a new manager at this point of the season make doing so a challenge. Who would be available at this time of year who is of the calibre that Chelsea would demand, who would want the position? Any new incumbent would have to impress a playing style upon a team that they were building effectively from scratch, with players who’ve already done for Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino, and with no pre-season or anything like that to get themselves prepared.

That two excellent coaches seem to have failed there in such a relatively short period of time suggests that wherever the biggest problem is at Stamford Bridge, it probably isn’t the manager. But the manager remains the disposable one, in a world in which no-one can sack the owners and the players are on extremely expensive (and in some cases extremely long) contracts. With FFP snapping at their heels, the natives becoming restless, and the owners showing no more indication of having the first idea of what they’re doing than ever, There are few signs at the moment that 2024 is going to be much happier for Chelsea than 2023 was.