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With 84 minutes gone at Stamford Bridge Cole Palmer did something off-grid, unprescribed and, in context, quite surprising, skittering past Conor Bradley near the corner flag, veering inside with that surprising gangly turn of speed and shooting from a fine angle and, in a clever, you-blink-first way, going inside Alisson as he came for the cross, a super-smart little piece of invention.
The ball curved away just enough to hit the post and bounce away from goal. Chelsea were 2-0 up at the time. Maybe he won’t get told off too much.
Happily for Palmer, two minutes into stoppage time Chelsea were awarded a penalty. He buried it, did the chilly brrr-it’s-cold stuff, and was mobbed pointedly by his teammates, including Robert Sánchez who ran the length of the pitch just to make it quite clear this was also about him.
It was Palmer’s first goal since 14 January, his first in 19 games to go with two assists in that time. Chelsea have been on an upturn in results in the last few weeks. But this is clearly not the greatest use of Cole Palmer, and another note in the lingering bad taste around this place at times. (Chelsea, covering every variable, even have a full-back whose name translates as “Bad Taste”).
In his TV interview after the game Palmer talked about the “idiots and trolls” of social media, which seemed a bit of a shame in victory. But then, Palmer’s mood, the process of Palmer-maximisation, remains an unanswered theme of Enzo Maresca’s management. How is this one going to play out?
This was an excellent afternoon for Chelsea. Victory makes it four in a row at just the right time. They still need to go to Newcastle and Nottingham Forest, but look in a good position not to be standing when the music stops.
Perhaps the stars are even aligning a little. The Club World Cup is already a massive windfall. Chelsea will get £70m or so just for getting through the group stage, bonus money, Fifa money, Dazn money, Saudi money. Chuck in £100m-odd from Uefa just for finishing in the top six. Chelsea can earn a huge amount this season for not doing very much very well.
They were lucky here to come up against a Liverpool team that was basically half asleep. At times it felt like there were three entities on the pitch. Liverpool pretending to be Liverpool for the day. This mannered Chelsea team playing to save its mannered season.
And also Palmer, a captive spirit on the right, but still the architect of this victory, even if watching him in this Chelsea team can feel a bit like watching Salvador Dalí pretend to be an accountant, diligently filing documents, notarising things, and all the while secretly painting a cup of fur under his desk.
Stamford Bridge had a chilly, grudging late-spring feel. John Kerry was in the very expensive seats, the 81-year-old one-time US secretary of state watching on as a sputtering superpower with a confused sense of mission tried to assert itself on the world and yes, yes, insert your own home-from-home punchline here.
Chelsea scored with three minutes gone, the move made by Palmer’s swift pass out to Pedro Neto, whose cross was expertly finished by Enzo Fernández. And from the start Palmer played a little deeper on the right than you might have wanted him.
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At times he had to cover at right-back for Moisés Caicedo as he wandered infield. Is that a good idea? Half an hour in he received a rolling wave of applause for chasing Cody Gakpo back towards his own goal. Is this progress? It has been a theme of the season, the question of individualism, harnessing talent, allowing it to breathe in a suffocating positional game. Under Maresca, Palmer has looked like a ghost in the machine, unsurprisingly, given he is the only player in this team anywhere near his type and quality. There’s no one here for him to riff off, to blue-sky ideas with.
For long periods his entire game was curling a pass into the run of Nicolas Jackson and watching, vaguely interested, as a kind of random ricochet ball took place, the chaos dribble theory.
But Palmer made Chelsea’s second goal by doing another unusual thing, easing away from Kostas Tsimikas and crossing into a messy penalty area where the ball was hacked and scuffed and blootered about until eventually it went in off Jarell Quansah.
That was pretty much that. For Liverpool, Darwin Núñez came on and bullocked about like a riderless horse in a jumps race. Roméo Lavia was excellent in the Chelsea midfield. And by the end Stamford Bridge was a happy place, even Maresca allowing himself a contained, controlled little caper on the touchline.
He is an amazing figure, able to sustain at all times that air of long-suffering calm, the look of a manager for whom every turn, every disappointment is just another masterful feint in the unknowable masterplan of Enzo Maresca.
At times it has looked a strange match-up. Buy all these young creative players. Then hire a systems manager who will turns them into units of telematic flesh, anti-adverts for themselves. There was a glimpse of something here. Whether it’s enough remains to be seen.
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