New toys! Never mind the score. Never mind the brittleness in a Chelsea performance that was fun and frisky, but felt at times like devouring a series of starter plates; and never mind that West Ham might easily have won but for the intervention of VAR in the dying moments.
Just check out the names. What a Chelsea starting XI this was. Here they come, the project boys, the Todd Academy, seven players under 24, five new signings and a side that carried its own sense of gameshow conveyor belt excitement. A World Cup winner. A 21-year-old French defensive prodigy. A frowning Ukrainian super-kid. A caravan. A holiday. A nice bearded man hoping for the best.
It is unrealistic to expect Chelsea’s swirl of starry players, a model that is unprecedented in English football, to click into a functioning shape straight away. This thing has no outline and no obvious end point. But it was fascinating to watch it fret and dazzle and search for its own edges.
For a while, Chelsea looked like running away with the game before being pegged back by West Ham’s tenacious qualities. A 1-1 draw could just as easily have been a 4-1 win or a 2-1 defeat. Welcome to the new world. You will, for the time being, need a notebook and, ideally, access to a few good scouting sites.
The London Stadium was a boisterous place at kick-off, gripped also with a note of curiosity. Chelsea have eight players out injured. Happily, they also have an abundance in reserve, able to send fresh waves into the meat grinder no matter what their losses, like the battle of Stalingrad fought by a battalion of jinky 21-year-old inside-forwards.
For half an hour this new-look team, decked out in their used teabag beige away shirts, played football from their own crisp, new-build footballing universe. With less than a minute gone João Félix and Mykhaylo Mudryk combined 40 yards from goal, romping forward side by side, a sudden flare of boyishly handsome energy that almost burst the defensive line.
There was another lovely moment as Reece James played a precision forward pass for Félix to run on to and produce the most delicious floaty dink over Lukasz Fabianski, a moment of synergy, movement, timing, imagination, slightly undermined by the fact that it was offside. But then, how much of this is real anyway? It’s all just content.
The main objection to Chelsea’s maniacal splurge is the old school logic that there is basically no plan and no structure in simply reeling in hundreds of millions of pounds of hyper-talented young players. And yet there is – and here Todd Boehly might turn at the door, swishing the tail of his rumpled overcoat – just one thing. You do end up with hundreds of millions of pounds of young talented players on the pitch.
Throw in some dreamboats. Bombard this thing with wonderkids, see what it looks like. For a while it was tempting to believe it will all just click, to drink in those dazzling little miniatures, those moments of light.
It helps that Chelsea were able to keep the ball so easily, Enzo Fernández running the game with no obvious interference from the claret shirts. He made the opening goal with some help from Mudryk, who lunged to win the ball back from Jarrod Bowen. Fernández cut inside, waited, thought about the World Cup for a bit, waited a bit more, then nudged the perfect angled pass to the far edge of the six-yard box. Félix clipped it low past Fabianski with all the ease of a man volleying an apple core into the office recycling bin.
Twelve minutes later, West Ham equalised with their second real attack, a moment of thrust from Bowen that found an open door on the right side of the defence, Emerson Palmieri scuffing a shot in at the back post.
What did Chelsea have in reply? More moments, more sparkle. Ten minutes before half-time Mudryk broke from inside his own half and you saw the pure jittery speed in his legs, a player who seems always to have another surging gear. What can this add up to? Will he find a stable base here to refine all this obvious talent?
A 1-1 half-time scoreline felt like the high point of the game. West Ham came on strong and could have snatched it. Graham Potter sent on his subs, but by now this thing was a puzzle without any obvious matching colours or shapes.
There is still something entertaining in the basic spectacle of Potter, the process man, trying to solve this. Chelsea’s model is a slightly crazed version of what he did at Brighton, finding a way to make the talent work, polishing the details.
The difference is that Potter is being asked to glue the Millennium Falcon together while hurtling through hyperspace. But there was still an energy here, a chemistry between the parts that will intrigue Chelsea’s supporters while they wait for the glorious future – so, so many glorious futures – to germinate.
