Two of Europe’s strongest defensive teams met in Group C of the Champions League on Wednesday.

Spaces within Chelsea’s 5-3-2

The problem of halfspace coverage when using two strikers has been detailed over at Spielverlagerung recently, and this game helped provide some more examples of this issue from both teams. This aspect has already been an issue for Atleti themselves previously. In their Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu towards the end of last season, Atleti had trouble accessing Kross and Modric from their 4-4-2 due to the pair’s deep halfspace positioning, as they were out of the zone of access of both the strikers and the wingers, which resulted in the two Real Madrid stars being able to exert a very high level of control on the game.

But now to Chelsea and the game at hand – Chelsea defended in a 5-3-2/5-3-1-1 shape. In midfield, Bakayoko was the #6, flanked by Kante to his right and Fabregas to his left. Eden Hazard played off of Morata and the pair both stayed fairly passive and central during Atletico’s possession phase.

As a result, the initial spaces that Atleti were able to play in when they had the ball were either side of the Chelsea’s strikers, most often on Atleti’s left side. This was simply due to the players that Atleti had on that side in their initial 4-4-2 formation, especially Koke, who was prepared to drop deep into the left halfspace to collect the ball and help circulation, along with Saul also coming to the left side.

Now Chelsea had to solve a problem that Nice grappled with in their Champions League qualifier against Napoli last month, which was that the right central midfielder of their 5-3-2 needed to move out to press the ball when the opponents had it in the left halfspace and wing areas, because the strikers were focused on the centre and more passive against the ball. This meant that there was a large amount of space to exploit between the lines for Napoli in that game.

The good thing was that Chelsea did indeed manage to solve the situation better than Nice did against Napoli. This was for two reasons. Firstly, the centre-backs and full-backs were more aggressive than those of Nice, and were able to step out to pressure any passes received in those spaces, especially when Atletico tried to play into those spaces diagonally from the wing. The second aspect was related to Atleti’s structure, and the fact that they just didn’t occupy or move into the spaces as well as perhaps could’ve done in order to take advantage of them, as we saw Napoli do in the game previously discussed.

See also: Atleti’s 4-4-2

In the first 20 or so minutes of the game Chelsea could also exploit the struggles of a two-man front line to defend both halfspaces with the superior halfspace coverage offered by their back three.

Chelsea were able to use this to make advances past Atleti’s first line of pressure with forward dribbles from their side-backs through the halfspaces. Taking up similarly central positions to Chelsea’s forwards, the two Atleti strikers were unable to access them easily, which allowed the aforementioned side-backs, Azpilicueta and Cahill, to have time and space in these areas.

The wide midfielders of Atletico Madrid wouldn’t close them down too aggressively, they were usually trying to prevent passes to Chelsea’s wing-backs from the ball-carrying side-backs, and all midfielders were also looking to minimise space for Chelsea to play in between lines, so didn’t push too far out.

This also meant that although Chelsea had found superiority in that area, they were unable to really capitalise on in because of the defending of Atletico Madrid which closed the space between lines as well as the space behind the defence, which are two key aspects that Chelsea look to exploit with their vertical passing and combination game under Conte.

Simeone changes to 4-5-1

Presumably having seen that his Atletico Madrid team were having their first line of pressure beaten too easily, manager Diego Simeone decided to change Atleti’s formation to a 4-5-1/4-3-3. Now Partey, Saul and Koke were the central midfielders, with Correa on the right, Carrasco moving over to the left side and Griezmann up front.

This helped them to prevent Chelsea’s side-backs from carrying the ball out from defence in the way that they had been doing beforehand because it gave Atleti more width in their first line of pressing, meaning that the space which existed in the halfspaces in front of Chelsea’s centre-backs was no longer there.

Usually only the ball-near winger would step up towards the side-back, while the other winger was more passive with the rest of the midfield line. Then if the ball was switched, the ball-far midfielder had time to move up to his centre-back while the other fell. It was a fairly well balanced approach to solving the situation from Simeone and was clearly effective in stopping the side-backs from being able to run through the halfspaces so easily.

The fact that this was the case meant that more emphasis was now on David Luiz, the middle centre-back, when it came to distributing the ball from the defensive line. Not just because the side-backs couldn’t contribute as much, but also because Atleti now just had Griezmann in the centre instead of two strikers, so in theory it should be easier for Luiz to find space to distribute the ball himself.

However much of the distribution from Luiz was similarly unsuccessful to that of the half-backs. Atleti’s midfield line blocked the centre very well, so hitting vertical passes into the feet of Hazard or Morata was difficult. Also Chelsea’s structure didn’t always afford much play through the centre, as Kante and Fabregas were often very widely positioned for central midfielders. It’s likely that this was intentional from Conte in order to overload the wing areas. Kante, interestingly, was usually positioned higher up the pitch than Fabregas, and in some scenes he took up a position as a right-sided inside forward, while Fabregas dropped deeper and more central to make a 3-4-2-1 structure that we are used to seeing from Chelsea. The unusual thing about it was seeing Kante so far forward.

Despite Luiz having some difficulties, it was his distribution from the back which helped lead to the first goal for Chelsea when he drove forward from defence and hit a diagonal pass to Hazard who had drifted out to the left wing. Chelsea attempted similar passes a few times in the match but it was the first time they had gotten Hazard into a good 1v1 situation from it. Hazard finds a cross to Morata, who heads the ball home.

Conclusion

The teams were fairly evenly matched in this game, and Atletico Madrid might consider themselves unfortunate to have conceded in the last minute. It also leaves Simeone’s side with work to do in this group – they are in 3rd place after a 0-0 draw with Roma in their previous Champions League fixture.