As first impressions go, those made by Ben Chilwell on Enzo Maresca in July had extreme consequences for an England international who was judged last summer to be so utterly incompatible with the new approach at Chelsea that he has not started a game for the club since.
He has not been the only big name who was once a fixture of the Gareth Southgate-era England to find himself launched into the wilderness by a Premier League manager this season – but he does seem to be the only one who did so without even putting his boots on. The 28-year-old has played just 45 minutes this season as a substitute in a League Cup tie against Barrow, which for a Champions League winner at the club will have stung.
For players such as Chilwell, as it has been for Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford, the world moves faster than ever now. Managers with the super-sized squads of the modern era can afford to push established players to the margins overnight. Seniority counts for little. Out of favour for six months can be an embarrassment. Out of favour for 12 months can signal the irreversible decline of a career. It is now or never for Chilwell to re-establish himself somewhere else.
Maresca announced early in the summer that Chilwell could not play the kind of system the new Chelsea manager favoured, which is to say demanding his full-backs step into midfield in possession. The stance has developed into a hill that Maresca very much appears willing to expire upon. As with many managers, that militancy seems to have become ever more entrenched even as results have turned against Chelsea.
It was the same with Sterling, jettisoned from Chelsea’s first-team squad and in no mood to hang around last summer. On loan at Arsenal, only briefly has Sterling shown the form that made him once one of the Premier League’s most effective players and for the most part Mikel Arteta has treated him like a player he can do without. At United, Rashford was played by Erik ten Hag and Ruben Amorim 24 times this season before eventually the latter insisted that it could go on no longer.
Chilwell has been in the cold since the leaves were still on the trees and he faded from view through autumn and now winter, regardless of results. As a measure of how swift the fall has been, only last season Chilwell was captain at times during Reece James’s absence. The pair are the only players left at the club from the 2021 Champions League final starting XI.
For his part, Chilwell is said to have accepted his situation with as much good grace as might be expected. A loan move to Crystal Palace looks like his only chance of playing again this season, although it would be no guarantee of a starting place, with Tyrick Mitchell the regular at left-back. Yet there would be appear to be significantly more chance of him playing than at Chelsea currently.
There is a potential reward out in the ether for Chilwell if he can play regularly again. Making his way around the big games of English football currently is Thomas Tuchel, an England manager in search of a team capable of winning a World Cup. Tuchel has already won a Champions League with Chilwell in his Chelsea team of 2021, and now with England there is some fluency in the left-back position.
That is the opportunity for Chilwell in the last few hours of the transfer window. At 28, another four months without playing would be a disaster for a career that has been interrupted by at least one serious injury. The speed with which clubs are now prepared to churn their squads and the dependency on trading that financial controls have established mean there seems to be greater choice. Players that would never have been available in years past are considered tradeable by clubs with profit and sustainability compliance to meet. That fluidity in the market means that players such as Chilwell, out of action for as long as he has been, have to find a way to play again.
Maresca may point out that he is not the only coach in the last 12 months to have regarded Chilwell as dispensable. Southgate left behind Chilwell, as well as his good friend James Maddison and Jack Grealish, for the European Championship last summer. All three were decisions which Southgate argued came down to what he saw in performance, but one also wondered if there was something else at play.
Sterling, and now Rashford, have had to pursue new starts elsewhere while Chilwell remains the last man still hanging on. In 2017, two years before he moved to Chelsea, and then 21 years old, Chilwell was one of the two chief options whom Liverpool considered for their new left-back. The other was Andy Robertson, the older of the pair, who had just suffered his second Premier League relegation with Hull City. Chilwell was much less experienced and just at the end of his first serious season in the Leicester first team. It was a close thing, but under Jürgen Klopp, Robertson’s intensity that edged it.
Both have built excellent careers since then but Robertson’s longevity has seen him into an eighth straight season, possibly his last, as a Liverpool starter. These kinds of careers are ever more rare these days and with Rashford close to his move, perhaps Chilwell will realise that it is his time to take the plunge, too.
