There is an inconvenient reality when judging Chelsea's failure to keep pace with Manchester City in the Premier League.
Apart from the traditional winter collapses felt under Antonio Conte, Maurizio Sarri and Frank Lampard, 2021/22 has been hindered by devastating injuries to vital players, a flurry of COVID cases that surged through the squad around Christmas and on top of that, an unrelenting schedule.
This has made a full-on autopsy harder to accomplish, which leads us to a place where they are no easy answers or simple conclusions. In the binary world of social media, this is not appreciated. It is much easier to boil issues down to a soundbite or a scapegoat to pin all our irritation.
