Gonzalo Higuaín and the Future of Sarriball

Gonzalo Higuaín has not had a good season. Maurizio Sarri is certainly not having a particularly happy new year. Now it seems that one of the most intriguing reunions in recent footballing history – both tactically and personally – is all but certain. How it works out will likely make or break Chelsea’s season.

Sarri and Higuaín’s paths crossed for just one year at Napoli, in the 2015/16 season. Sarri was initially unimpressed.

“I said to him he was too lazy and that if he didn’t change his attitude he’d never become the best centre forward in the world”, he told reporters that October. “He couldn’t get one hundred percent  out of his capabilities. We spoke clearly, so this turned into an honest and direct rapport that probably helps motivate him.”

That rapport worked spectacularly. Higuaín dropped around 4kg of weight, became visibly more mobile, and scored 36 goals in 35 games in Serie A – beating Gunnar Nordahl’s 65-year-old league record.

Gonzalo Higuain during happier times

The past is a foreign country. Higuaín is once again overweight and underperforming, cast adrift by Juventus to make financial room for Cristiano Ronaldo. He has scored six Serie A goals this season, all against lesser opposition, and his expected goals stats in the last two seasons, although passable, are a shadow of the numbers he ran up for Napoli in that perfect campaign – 0.46 and 0.43 compared to 0.82.

For Sarri, a fine start at Stamford Bridge has turned sour at alarming speed. We know now that he sees his own players as “impossible to motivate” and has criticised their attitudes publicly, as he once bemoaned Higuaín’s in private. Sarriball has suffered a puncture.

Whether it can be reinflated will depend on this transfer. If Sarri can remotivate Higuaín, he will have one of the deadliest strikers in the world at his disposal, with Eden Hazard returned to his favoured role on the left as a creative foil. Fail, and he will simply have added another malcontent to a dressing room filled with players eyeing up their contract expiry dates.

Higuaín, for his part, loved working with Sarri.

“Sarri made me grow and he has been a great coach for me… I can only thank him”, ESPN report him as saying when he left Naples for Turin.

All rather lovely, but Higuaín can be a spiky character. In the same interview he took vitriolic aim at Napoli chairman Aurelio De Laurentiis; numerous club and national coaches have found him a challenge to work with. Sarri will need to bring Higuaín back under his spell quickly.

Clearly he feels their relationship can be rekindled, but should it go otherwise, Higuaín seems to be the last man you want in an already sulky dressing room – when he sulks, it spills out on to the pitch, as his return of one goal in three months at Milan testifies.

On the pitch, though, things will be more straightforward but no less interesting. Not known for his tactical flexibility – according to Jonathan Wilson his midfield set-up has changed just once, briefly, in his professional career – Sarri used Higuaín as a traditional centre forward, flanking him with two inside forwards whose movement could get the best out of the finishing abilities of a man who rarely strays far from the penalty spot.

When the Argentine departed San Paolo, Sarri brought Dries Mertens into the front line as a false nine and, flanked by Lorenzo Insigne and José Callejón, the Belgian formed the focal point of a dynamic front three that was supported by Marek Hamšik’s late runs into the box.

It is this set-up that Sarri has tried to crowbar on to the Chelsea squad, pushing Hazard forward into an unfamiliar role. Chelsea have suffered from Sarri’s rigidity, with Hazard struggling manfully to link up with his less mobile flanking colleagues.

“If Higuaín can rediscover his best form, Chelsea’s attacking threat will increase exponentially.”

Players who could have fitted neatly into Sarri’s 2015/16 formation are left to rot on the bench. Giroud was good enough to play the number nine role for France’s World Cup-winning side and would surely have performed a thoroughly respectable impression of Higuaín. Pedro, who in his Barcelona pomp was the perfect inside forward, cutting into the box from out wide and causing defenders all manner of positional headaches, is not trusted to repeat past feats.

The consequence has been a Chelsea side largely shorn of attacking threat. When Hazard receives the ball in advanced positions, he finds himself without support. When he drops deep to start the play, he is still the furthest forward.

Higuaín’s signing enforces a return to the more traditional front line that Sarri utilised in Naples. Hazard will return to his favoured inside forward position and will surely have more influence on the game as a result. If Higuaín can rediscover his best form, Chelsea’s attacking threat will increase exponentially.

It could have other ramifications. One ongoing tactical issue for Chelsea has been that teams have worked out that the midfield can be neutralised by the simple expedient of man-marking Jorginho. He is intended to be the creative hub of the side, but with a man stuck to him he is reduced to sideways passing, preventing momentum from gathering. If Hazard reverts to wide left, he can provide a second creative fulcrum, forcing opposition to bring midfield markers into the defensive third and leaving Jorginho with room to breathe.

That could have a knock-on effect in itself. If Hazard attracts the attention of an opposing midfield, it finally frees Marcos Alonso. With N’golo Kanté nailed to the right-hand side of Chelsea’s midfield three and asked to replicate the box-to-box style of Napoli’s Allan, the left-hand side becomes a point of vulnerability for Chelsea. Accordingly, Alonso has increasingly been forced to stay back when he was so potent going forward, outside of Hazard, in Chelsea’s title-winning 2016/17 season.

Eden Hazard, cutting an appropriately isolated figure

This creates a terrible problem for Chelsea’s opponents – if you attempt to lock Jorginho out of the game, you risk allowing Hazard space to work his magic. Deny Hazard that space instead, and Jorginho has time to use his full range of passing. Try to do both and you sacrifice so many players to the defensive cause that you struggle to find an attacking shape of your own.

All of this is still hypothetical. Higuaín could prove the key to getting the best out of a Chelsea team that is failing to make the most of its star players’ best attributes – but if the player who arrives is the out-of-sorts diva with which Gennaro Gattuso is currently familiar, it could easily deepen the problems Chelsea have.

Gonazlo Higuaín, the future of Sarriball depends on you.