As the old cliché goes: Football is a game of fine margins. It's true. A centimetre can effectively decide a game. It can determine someone's career to its most dramatic extent.
See Saturday afternoon for example. If Raheem Sterling's shot had gone a centimetre wider – or a couple – of Ainsley Maitland-Niles, then Chelsea would have been level with Southampton and would have had the momentum to go on and win the game. There would still be questions over Graham Potter's future, sure, but social media would be a much more pleasant place to be.
But in reality, Sterling didn't score. Chelsea didn't. The Blues remain in 10th place in the Premier League table and have won just one match in 10 in all competitions.
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It's a bleak time to be a Chelsea supporter, despite the club having one of the all-time most exciting January transfer windows where they splashed out a whopping £300million on eight new signings. There was a fresh feel of optimism around Stamford Bridge but four games since the window closed, they have lost two out of those matches, drawing the others.
Defensively, Chelsea have looked sound, although they did miss Thiago Silva on Saturday with the Brazilian being rested. Why they still rely on a 38-year-old defender to look their best is another question for a different day.
However, in offensive areas, Chelsea have looked rather toothless. Creatively, not too bad at all, really. Earlier in the season, particularly just before the World Cup break, the Blues were unable to create any meaningful chances which was a really concerning sign. Now, though, the creativity isn't the issue – it's the end product.
It's been well documented that Chelsea haven't got an out-and-out No. 9 capable of scoring 20 or more goals in a season. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and David Datro Fofana are the only fit and available strikers for selection right now and the former is out of the picture and the latter is still developing.
The players they do have at their disposal, however, are still capable of taking chances when they come their way. But that hasn't been the case. There's only so much Potter can do in that regard.
Potter is in charge of creating the sequences and patterns of play in order to create the opportunity. Once the chance arises, then it's the attacker's responsibility to put the ball in the back of the net. There's nothing the Chelsea head coach can do from then on.
This - Chelsea missing countless opportunities in a game - is absolutely nothing new. People have seemingly forgotten the same thing happened under Thomas Tuchel. It happened under Frank Lampard.
Speaking after Chelsea's 1-1 draw with Everton in December 2021, Tuchel pinpointed "big chances" being missed as the reason his side dropped points. This is just one example of Tuchel being frustrated with his side's wastefulness in front of goal, but we could list a lot more.
"We missed big chances to get the result in the first-half and second-half we did not find the rhythm consistently and tried to bring on some energy from the bench, but it was hard," Tuchel told BT Sport. "We had the lead and gave it away with one free-kick.
"Football is almost never like one reason why things go this way, but one big reason for sure is the chances we missed today. We could have been two or three up and were playing with fire."
This is nothing new. The difference is Tuchel was still finding a way, somehow, to get positive results, even when his side were wasteful in front of goal. Potter can only influence what happens before the chance arrives, so he needs to ensure that occurs more regularly so Chelsea's attackers have even more opportunities of finding the back of the net.
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