For several months Antonio Conte has given off the weary air of a man meeting the challenges facing Chelsea with grim determination rather than his usual intense energy, but in the aftermath of Saturday’s lacklustre defeat against Crystal Palace his sceptical assessment of the landscape carried greater resonance.
“I think every season is different,” he told reporters. “Last season is the past. Now it is another squad, different players and for this reason, if we compare last season, we didn’t play Europa League or Champions League.
“This season we are facing four competitions, and we are having a few problems doing this. When you have a few injuries, you are in trouble. We mustn’t be happy. This season will be very difficult for us. For this reason we have to put 150 percent in; 100 percent won’t be enough.”
Chelsea were everything Conte hates in a football team at Selhurst Park: lethargic, unbalanced and utterly lacking in “personality” — all against a team that had failed to even register a Premier League goal prior to Saturday. In their opening-day defeat to Burnley they could at least point to a combination of misfortune and indiscipline, and in losing to Manchester City they were jaded and outplayed by elite opponents at the peak of their powers.
Unlike last season, Conte has also never been able to call upon his strongest XI, losing Alvaro Morata and N’Golo Kante to injury just as Eden Hazard had begun to show signs of rediscovering his best form after sitting out the whole of preseason with a broken ankle.
But the Premier League table doesn’t care for mitigation, and all defeats are of equal weight when the points are tallied. After eight matches, the wider picture painted is one that justifies Conte’s pessimism: if recent history is anything to go by, Chelsea’s title defence is already over.
That may sound overly dramatic, but the reality is that no team in the Premier League era has lost three of its first eight matches and gone on to win the title. On average the eventual champions lose just under 4.3 matches in a 38-game season. Having already tasted defeat three times in the first three months, Chelsea’s margin for further error between now and May is negligible.