Tag Futebol

Forget Santos: Chelsea star is their closest thing to peak Lampard in years

by z3u9t.icu Uncategorized

Chelsea kept their unbeaten November form going in both the Premier League and Champions League with a straightforward 2-0 victory away at Burnley on Saturday lunchtime.

Pedro Neto picked up his sixth goal contribution of the league season when handing the travelling Blues the 1-0 lead, before Enzo Fernandez made sure of all three points late on when he gobbled up a chance on the 88th minute that was all Marc Guiu’s making from off the bench.

Away from the goalscorers mentioned, Andrey Santos also stood out in the midfield ranks, with Enzo Maresca no doubt ready to select the 21-year-old more often, off the back of such an assured showing at Turf Moor.

Santos' performance in numbers

The number 17 was thrown into the starting XI in Lancashire, with Moises Caicedo rested back in Premier League action, after lining up for Ecuador deep into the international break.

Thankfully, Caicedo’s absence wasn’t felt whatsoever, as Santos’ individual showing was described as “outstanding” at the full-time whistle by former Stamford Bridge great Joe Cole.

Indeed, the 21-year-old came into the side and looked right at home in Caicedo’s midfield anchor role, winning seven duels and two tackles to really boost the Blues centrally when Burnley attempted to work openings.

On top of that, Santos looked assured and comfortable on the ball, too, without ever really looking flashy with 34 passes accurately registered.

While Maresca will take plenty away from Santos’ polished showing, with one Chelsea content creator stating that he was “everywhere”, he did need the likes of Neto to come up trumps with a moment of quality in attack to seal the win, away from the Brazilian, allowing the visitors to tick.

While Santos has previously showcased an eye for goal and demonstrated his qualities as a box-crashing 8, he’s not the only Blues star evoking memories of Stamford Bridge royalty in Frank Lampard.

Chelsea star could be Maresca's Lampard

Come the end of his illustrious Premier League career, Lampard would bag 177 top-flight goals, with the former Blues captain having a great habit of sneaking into the box and finishing off chances expertly.

Romelu Lukaku would even hail Lampard as an “unbelievable” finisher of chances when reminiscing about his brief time in the Chelsea first team alongside the modern great.

In the here and now, the aforementioned Fernandez also has a similarly impactful knack to be able to finish off chances, with Guiu playing a late pass into a dangerous space up against Burnley, knowing that his captain could be there to kill the game off.

After all, that’s amazingly Fernandez’s fourth Premier League goal of the season already, meaning the World Cup-winning star is now Chelsea’s joint-top goalscorer in league action for the season with Neto, which is an accolade Lampard would regularly claim during his celebrated stay in West London.

Yet, there is far more to both the Argentine’s game and Lampard’s game away from scoring big goals, with pundit Micah Richards going out of his way to hail the £107 man as having “everything” in his locker now to be a “leader” at Chelsea earlier in the season.

Games played

11

Goals scored

4

Assists

1

Touches*

70.7

Accurate passes*

46.5 (85%)

Shots*

2.2

Big chances missed

4

Key passes*

1.8

Big chances created

4

Ball recoveries*

3.9

Total duels won*

3.9

The table above very much backs up Richards’ assessment of Fernandez being a complete midfield talent worthy of wearing Chelsea’s club armband, with an energy present in his game that matches that of Santos, with 3.9 ball recoveries averaged and 3.9 duels won per game this season in league action.

However, it is his ability to fashion chances galore and score plentiful goals that really does make that comparison to Lampard even stronger, with Fernandez beating the likes of Cole Palmer to the top prize when it comes to most goal contributions tallied up for the Blues over the last year, as the 24-year-old now sits on a weighty 21 goal contributions, next to the Englishman’s 15.

Fernandez also has a taste for silverware now, too, having lifted the Club World Cup in the summer, as he strives to lift Premier League titles like those before him, with Santos also wanting to mature into a consistent first-team star next to him.

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ByDominic Lund Nov 23, 2025

Has 2024 been annus horribilis for Australia's batters?

by h716a5.icu Uncategorized

Batters all over the world have found the going tough, but Australia’s, in particular, have been treading water

Andrew McGlashan04-Dec-2024In Perth, Australia’s top four made 29 runs between them in eight innings. One of those innings was nightwatcher Pat Cummins’, but it continued a theme of the last year where there have been diminishing returns from the top order. Often someone in the middle or lower order – particularly Mitchell Marsh last season and Alex Carey in Christchurch – has helped them out of difficult situations, but in the opening Test against India, there was no escape.”Batters, we want to hold our own – we know how good our bowlers have been for us in the past and they’ve got us out of trouble a lot,” Travis Head said on Monday. “As a batting group, we know that if we get enough runs on the board, we put ourselves in a great position.”In the incumbent XI, only Carey is averaging over 30 in Tests this year. The injured Cameron Green tops the list with 302 runs at 50.33 courtesy of his career-best 174 not out in Wellington. It has been widely spoken about that batting has become tougher in Australia, something that Usman Khawaja went into detail on in an interview with the before the India series.Related

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“When I first started playing first-class cricket, and I’m up to my 16th year now, the wickets were better, 100% the wickets were flatter. Easier to bat on,” he said. “The balls were probably the biggest difference. Those Kookaburra balls had a single layer of lacquer on them, now they have a double lacquer, and the writing just doesn’t go off them at all. And they have these new, raised seams, which I think is the biggest change in Australian cricket for a long time.”That’s why wobble seam is so prevalent now. Everyone wants to bowl wobble seam, not swinging them, because if there’s massive seams on them you just put them down and they go boing, boing, boing, boing. That wasn’t around back in the day, the old Kookaburra Turf seams were so small, you didn’t get as much nip, you had to try and swing it and then when it didn’t you had to try to reverse it.”And I’m genuine, I 100% believe I’m a better player now than I was when I first started playing first-class cricket. But I found first-class cricket when I started playing easier than what I do now. The wickets are greener, these balls are tougher, the game has 100% changed. And I say to the boys, ‘don’t worry about the old boys, don’t compare yourself to the old boys, compare yourself to now’ because 1000 runs was the elite level of Shield cricket when I started, it’s more like 800 runs now.”But how slim are the pickings compared to how other teams are going and more historically?Australia’s batters treading water in 2024Put alongside other teams, it is clear Australia have struggled with the bat this year. For teams to have played at least six Tests, only Bangladesh and West Indies are below them for the returns of Nos. 1 to 7.

One of the notable aspects for Australia this year is the lack of hundreds with just two so far: Green’s against New Zealand and Head’s against West Indies in Adelaide. Comparing just the number of centuries between teams doesn’t give a fair picture due to the different number of Tests, but an innings-per-hundred ratio (for Nos. 1-7) paints a picture: again, only West Indies and Bangladesh are below Australia in 2024.

They are also yet to reach 400, with the 383 against New Zealand in Wellington the top score, although they still have three Tests to pass that mark. The last time they did not make a 400-run total in a calendar year was 1990.But it’s a tough yearAustralia, though, aren’t alone. We’ve seen two teams bowled out for under 50 this year and another for 55. The six lowest all-out totals have come in the first innings of a Test, rather than later in the game when a pitch may have deteriorated naturally. The game is certainly result-orientated with just one draw (a rain-effect game in Trinidad) to date this year.The collective global average for Nos. 1-7 this year is 31.84 – only four years of 20-plus Tests have produced a lower figure – so Australia are not trending massively below that.A different ball game altogether? Usman Khawaja thinks so•Cricket Australia/Getty ImagesIn the , after India’s 46 against New Zealand, Mike Atherton wrote: “Although there are occasional exceptions, attack is now seen as the best – indeed, the only – form of defence. When was the last time you heard a captain or a coach deviate from the line: “Go harder”? Could there ever be a scenario where modern captains and coaches would think otherwise?”… Added to that is the psychological shift, post the prevalence of short-form cricket, of a wicket losing its value. The shorter the game, the fewer the consequences for getting out, and batsmen play more freely in all formats as a result than before. I’m not arguing for a return to the blockathons of the past, by the way – although I’d certainly argue that a more nuanced, less one-size-fits-all approach can work – merely trying to explain how the present player thinks differently, and the occasional consequences of that.”Among the 24 years to have included at least 40 Tests, the collective 2024 batting average of 28.60 is the second lowest behind 2018. Widening that out to years with at least 20 Tests, and only 1959 slots in above. But Test runs have never been scored quicker than 2024. A lot of that is down to the way England play, and India’s top order showed in the second innings in Perth how to build a Test innings by wearing an attack down, but more broadly is it a case of getting them before the ball gets you?Where does this year rank for Australia?It is certainly a lean one. Of contemporary times, it’s again only 2018 that saw lower overall returns when David Warner and Steven Smith were absent for a significant part of the year. Beyond that, it’s going back to 1984 (with a minimum of six Tests) to find a comparative year.Drilling a little deeper into the top order and as things stand (with three Tests to play this year so there’s time for the numbers to improve), this is only the second year where five batters in positions one to seven in a Test team who have played ten or more innings are averaging under 30 – noting that positions can be altered by the use of a nightwatcher.

Also, since January 2023, of the current top seven excluding Nathan McSweeney with just a single Test to his name, Marsh, who returned to the side midway through that year, is the only batter to have improved his Test average in that period. Khawaja’s reduction, though, is very small while Smith’s is down from a very high base. Marnus Labuschagne’s is the most stark.

To go back to Khawaja’s point about the challenges now facing batters in Australia, last season’s Sheffield Shield average was the lowest of the last 20 seasons. This summer, with half the matches played, the average is up from 27.21 to 32.81. Can Australian batting rise again?

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