The announcement, when it came, was odd to say the least. Barcelona had just struck a €38 million deal with Chelsea for the transfer of Cesc Fabregas
and the statement released by the Catalan club to pronounce their
midfielder's departure went well beyond the usual formalities.
"There has been a downward trend in his stats every season at the club,"
Barcelona's official website read. "He slipped right back into the FCB
system as if he'd never been away but, despite glowing starts to each
campaign, Cesc's contributions to the cause gradually decreased as each
season drew to a close.
"From being someone who joined in with
the attack, supplying and scoring goals, the magic tended to fade later
on in each season."
As official statements go, it was certainly
curious, and it is difficult not to sense a strong whiff of
behind-the-scenes tension between player and club but, regardless of the
internal politics that may have been at work, the club made a fair
point.
Even more damningly, they provided the figures to back
it up. "He only scored one, six and one goals in the last 24 games of
each season," the statement said.
Over in north London, Arsene Wenger might have afforded himself a wry
smile. The pattern would have been little surprise to the Frenchman, who
saw Fabregas, in his penultimate season at the Emirates Stadium, score
15 of his 19 goals before the New Year. The following season, all three
of his league goals came in the same period.
Unfortunately for
Chelsea, history looks to be repeating itself. The club's elimination
from the Champions League by 10-man Paris Saint-Germain and a rather
tepid display at home to Southampton four days later confirmed what many
onlookers had been noting for some time now: the Blues of 2015 are a
far cry from the side who looked near-undefeatable throughout the first
half of the season. And the starkest difference between the two
incarnations has been the form of their Catalan playmaker.
As with his time in La Liga, this dip is easily quantified.
Fabregas wasted little time, after returning to England, in zooming to
the top of the Premier League's assists chart – totting up six in his
first four games alone – and he remains the division's clear leader in
that regard with 15. However, only one of those have come from his last
12 outings in all competitions .
The assist can tend to be a
rather crude statistic but such a steep drop-off is not a case of mere
coincidence, nor is the fact that it has occurred in almost perfect
tandem with his team's similarly underwhelming performances. Since their
chief creator last laid on a goal, on January 17 against Swansea City,
Chelsea's win rate has plummeted from 75 per cent to 42.
The
Spaniard would likely argue that the team's strikers should also bear
some responsibility. A creator, after all, is only as good as his
goalscorers and Diego Costa is another whose output has taken a dramatic
dive of late. Since that same game against Swansea, the striker has
scored once in just under 13 hours of football, having averaged just
over a goal a game before then. Although separating chicken from egg is
no easy task, it is clear that both players – as with their team as a
whole – have been struggling, with each likely to be accentuating the
other's struggles.
A closer look at Fabregas's play offers a better illustration of how
his early-season incision has started to elude him. Since Christmas, he
has been making key passes with less and less regularity – their
frequency dropping from once every 26 minutes to once every 46.
Crucially, Fabregas's overall number of touches per game has lessened
by only the finest margin in that time (from 104 to 100). So it is not
the degree of his involvement which is the problem but more the level of
ambition and penetration with which he imbues it.
One reason
behind the Spaniard's worrying dint is surely the almost non-existent
rotation policy imposed by Jose Mourinho this term. The logic behind
Mourinho's thinking is obvious – surge into an early lead and build from
there – and to an extent it is vindicated by Chelsea's six-point lead
at the top of the Premier League. But his methods have a flip-side: in
the knock-out rounds of the Champions League, sparkling early-season
form counts for nothing.
It is something that Chelsea
discovered to their cost against PSG. Fabregas was far from alone in
appearing both physically and mentally fatigued but was perhaps the most
obvious, clocking up fewer passes than each of his central-midfield
opponents and less than half the number of tackles (three) as waif-like
playmaker Marco Verratti (seven), who dominated for his side.
Fabregas has never been an especially explosive player but one only
needs to have seen a handful of his recent outings to notice that his
capacity to surge forwards with the ball and to inject an instantaneous
urgency into his team's play, as he was doing effortlessly only a few
months ago, seems to have been somewhat extinguished.
Witness, for example, the way he drives towards the penalty box,
leaving defenders in his wake, to lay on Oscar's opener against QPR in
November. It is a facet of his game that has rarely been seen since the
turn of the year. That pace has since given way to ponderousness.
That he has not been able to add to his pre-Christmas tally of four
goals simply reinforces the notion that a player who tends to tire early
– and who has become accustomed to putting his feet up over the
Christmas period – is lapsing once again into a familiar pattern.
It is not as though Fabregas's invention has been replaced by defensive
input. His combined tally of tackles and interceptions in his 18 league
outings before the turn of the year stood at 55, or 3.1 per game. In
2015, this has wilted to 2.9.
Result-driven pragmatism might
have replaced Chelsea's early-season exuberance as Mourinho has started
gearing his side towards the business end of the season but his
playmaker appears to have sacrificed the latter without intensifying the
former.
Every player, of course, is entitled to their barren
spells. The problem with Fabregas is that his current form speaks to
something broader and more ominous: a career-long habit of petering out
when it matters most.
Again, it is Barcelona's summer statement
which explains things in the bluntest terms. "For some reason, he was
never as good in the second half of a season as in the first," it
concluded.
After three years, Barcelona were clearly at a loss
as to why this was. Mourinho, if he wants this season's likely domestic
success to translate more readily into European glory, cannot afford to
remain similarly clueless.