Liverpool were held to a 1-1 draw by European Champions Chelsea in the English Premier League at the weekend.
Chelsea played the entire 2nd half with 10 men after Reece James received a red card at the end of the first half. The match was even in the opening half but Liverpool came back hard in the second half.
The Reds attempted a total of 17 shots and 8 shots were on target. Liverpool’s xG timeline shows that 70% of the shots attempted towards Chelsea goal were in the second half when Chelsea played with 10-men. Mohamed Salah scored their only goal with a penalty and had 2 shots on target. Liverpool defenders were also on the target and saw their shots saved by the ever-reliable Edouard Mendy.
Chelsea team defended well in the whole match and even with 10 players on the pitch. The team had a very high Ppda of 39.1. Few tackles were attempted by Chelsea players but there were 69 interceptions and clearances made were thrice the number of clearances that Liverpool had made.
The challenge intensity was lower than Liverpool’s players but Chelsea players had a high defensive duels win rate. There were 61 duels contested and Chelsea players won 45 times. Aerially both the teams contested 33 duels and they won equal number of aerial duels. Other than this the Blues were very disciplined with their tackling and only made 4 fouls out of which 1 was a penalty. Liverpool crosses were well dealt by the defenders as there were only 11 successful crosses out of the possible 33 and 6 crosses were well blocked by the Blues.
The Chelsea players’ average player position shows that the team played a lot in their half during the match. Only Lukaku and Mount were the players in the opposition half. Thiago Silva was introduced in the second half and Chelsea played once again with 5 defenders. Liverpool’s subsequent 12 corners were well defended and none of them resulted in a goal. The Reds were unable to dribble past Chelsea defenders’ multiple times and the Blues defenders nearly had a 50% win rate.
Conclusion
The Chelsea defenders were very disciplined in their defensive work on the field. The Blues intercepted and cleared a lot of passes made by Liverpool. The defending was clean and the duels win rate was high. Although, there were some impressive saves by the goalkeeper, Chelsea were able to defend their goal really well.
