LONDON — At a club with a revolving door as readily used as Chelsea, it can be easy to get lost in the blur of constant change. Saturday’s fixture offered a snapshot: When the Blues last took on Hull City in the FA Cup earlier this year, five of the starting XI selected by Liam Rosenior that day have since been sold or loaned out.

Xabi Alonso has been airlifted into this whirlpool of churn to try and find some stability. But despite the calm exterior, beneath the cashmere sweater and spotless white sneakers is an experimental tactician with a taste for the zany. These unorthodox ideas can flourish—a complete system change at Bayer Leverkusen led to Bundesliga glory—or flounder; Fran García never returned to Real Madrid’s left wing.

At this embryonic stage of the campaign, it’s perhaps no surprise that Chelsea’s wacky professor is yet to find his perfect formula.

“We are still in the early days to know what this team, for sure, is going to be,” the Basque schemer warned ahead of Chelsea’s fourth Premier League fixture of the campaign. After a relentlessly chaotic 2–2 draw at Stamford Bridge this weekend, it became clear that his front three are the only players who won’t be subjected to further experimentation.

Double-Edged Sword of Experimentation

One of the intriguing wrinkles from Chelsea’s spirited defeat to Arsenal last weekend came at corner kicks. Under the watch of their long-haired, expensively acquired set-piece coach Austin MacPhee, the Blues left four players on the halfway line while defending these dead balls, robbing Arsenal of the raw material to make their infamous meat wall.

Hull have proven to be one of the division’s deadliest set-piece specialists so far this season and were given the same respect as Arsenal. MacPhee sent a cluster blue shirts onto the halfway line for Hull’s first corner of the game. Not only did this limit the visitors’ threat, but it gave Chelsea the numbers to mount a blistering 18-second counter-attack finished off by Morgan Rogers.

Rogers, it should be noted, started the move on the edge of his own box (see below), as he was left to mark Hull’s Regan Slater on the hunt for any second balls.

However, when Chelsea were defending a corner from the opposite side in the first half, Rogers was shifted into the advanced party awaiting a breakaway. This left Mohamed Belloumi with the freedom of the King’s Road to snaffle up the second ball and slam Hull into a shock first-half lead.

The beauty of this sport is that every tactical tweak is a double-edged sword. Alonso’s former manager Rafa Benítez captured this dynamic best with his “short blanket” metaphor: “You cover your head, you have your feet cold, but if you cover your feet, you have your head cold.”

Unfortunately for the Blues, this is not a new development when it comes to set pieces; Chelsea have now conceded three times from these scenarios in just four Premier League games. “I don’t like it,” Alonso seethed.

Chelsea Struggle Up Against New Challenge

Saturday’s clash pitted two teams tilted towards the same end of several tables against one another. As many were quick to point out, this was fourth hosting third in the Premier League standings at the start of the weekend. More interestingly, however, these two clubs ranked 19th and 20th in terms of possession statistics across the first weeks of the new season.

One of the most surprising details from Alonso’s start to life in west London has been his willingness to let the opposition have the ball. Since Spain and Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona conquered all before them with a monopoly of short passes between 2008–12, possession has become a non-negotiable for almost every elite team. After the actual score, it’s the first statistic flashed up in every match coverage.

After the initial wave of wild-eyed obsession, many managers realized that having more of the ball was not something to strive toward in isolation. However, even if people stopped actively targeting hitting the 1,000-pass mark, the consequence of being a dominant team who spent more of the match attacking than defending ultimately led to higher possession statistics. So, when Alonso’s new side completed just 155 passes against Brighton with 26% of the ball, some eyebrows were raised.

No team has won the Premier League while averaging less than 55% possession since Leicester City’s freak feat in 2015–16. Chelsea boasted just 36.5% possession across their first three league games of the new campaign. That was a figure surpassed by all but one team across the entire competition: Hull.

Chelsea’s New Challenge

Sergej Jakirović’s battling Championship playoff winners deployed a reactive style while finishing sixth in England’s second tier last season—so there was never any intention of taking the game to top-flight opponents, especially not a side which has proven to be as ruthless in transition as Alonso’s Chelsea.

Hull dutifully had 32% possession at Stamford Bridge, giving Chelsea the ball but not the initiative. “We controlled that,” Jakirović rightly surmised after watching his team rack up more xG (1.49 to 0.89) and shots (13 to 12) than their illustrious opponents.

Alonso, to his credit, knew this would happen. “For sure, there will be games that we have a lot of possession, but we have struggled to score,” he warned before even traveling to Arsenal last weekend. “What we want is, we are able to adapt.” That adaptation process was painful on Saturday.

Hull’s equalizer was an onion of ineptitude for Chelsea, with each second bringing another layer of stupidity. Wesley Fofana seemed bizarrely content to let Konstantinos Tzolakis’s long punt forward drop over his head while Malo Gusto was far too easily outmuscled by Ryan Giles at the corner flag. Jorrel Hato was the guiltiest party, as static as a windmill as Giles’s looping cross bounced over the Dutch defender’s head, only belatedly pirouetting to find Belloumi on hand to blast Hull level.

There had been a lengthy break in play immediately preceding the goal. Hull’s players took the treatment for Tzolakis as a chance to take on Jakirović’s frenzied instructions while Chelsea’s contingent switched off. The visitors had ample opportunity to win all three points; Emiliano Martínez made some decisive saves but his nervy spills of the ball inspired the sort of anxious sounds in the Stamford Bridge crowd known as the Robert Sánchez soundtrack.

Alonso damningly described his entire team’s defensive effort as “soft.”

Alonso’s Only Untouchables Weighed Down

Alonso only made two changes to the lineup which started against Arsenal six days ago but it was anyone’s guess how this collection of similar individuals would actually line up. Many suspected a shift to a back four to accommodate at least one of the two right backs Alonso had named, or perhaps Pedro Neto on the left. Would Cole Palmer be ushered into a more orthodox No. 10 role? No, no and no.

Malo Gusto started on the right hand side of a back three with Neto at right wingback. The Portuguese forward was unshackled when Chelsea had the ball but so was Gusto, who wandered into midfield while Reece James, another natural right back, dropped into the middle of Chelsea’s splitting center backs.

There was a logic to this unexpected dynamic; James is Chelsea’s most probing passer from deep positions, so finding a way to shuttle him into the middle of a back three—the role on the pitch with the most time and space to lift his head—made sense against a team which was going to sit in a compact shape. Yet, it didn’t actually lead to any penetration. Chelsea had just three shots in a first half that ended with the hosts trailing 2–1.

The motionless Hato was forced out of his frozen position to take a seat on the bench for the second half yet Pep Chavarría’s introduction forced no change of system; he pulled wide while Gusto continued to be actively shoehorned into midfield, offering as much cutting edge as a spoon in a world full of pork chops.

Necessity is the mother of invention and Moisés Caicedo’s extended absence through injury has undoubtedly forced Alonso into some lateral thinking when it comes to his midfield. However, there has been no need to tweak the front three.

Eight of Chelsea’s 10 Premier League goals this season have been scored by one of João Pedro, Palmer or Rogers. The triumvirate clunkily branded JP Morgan was once again responsible for the team’s entire attacking threat against Hull; all three combined for Rogers’s breakaway opener while Palmer’s solo wriggling down the left teed up Pedro’s equalizer.

There will come a point when Alonso will need to broaden the scope of threat his team offers but for now he can probably take some comfort from being able to rely upon at least three players. The other eight positions are very much up for grabs.