Time moves fast in football and Conte knows it

Tiemoue Bakayoko and David Luiz after the heavy defeat to Roma in the Italian capital sum up the current mood at Stamford Bridge. (AP)

LONDON: Five weeks ago, Chelsea went to Atletico Madrid, played brilliantly and won 2-1 with a last-minute Michy Batshuayi goal. It was a performance that seemed to mark them out as potential Champions League winners and suggested whatever problems Antonio Conte previously had in the Champions League were in the past.
That display, more than any other, was what led many to think that this year, after six seasons of underachievement, English football might once more be mounting a challenge in Europe. It is hard to believe that the Chelsea that lost 3-0 away to Roma on Tuesday was the same side.
Defensively they were a shambles, particularly after half-time, something Conte made no attempt to disguise, describing the performance as “really, really bad. Bad for a team like us. Last season we showed great hunger, great will to do something important. We won the league and did a miracle.”
The description of last season’s league title as a “miracle” perhaps sounds hyperbolic, and it probably is. But it’s also probably the case that the magnitude of what Chelsea achieved last season has not been fully appreciated. They had a slim squad that a year earlier had finished 10th.
The summer would have been the time to kick on, but Conte is not the first Chelsea manager to find the club unwilling to spend from a position of strength. This season was always going to be harder, partly because of the demands of the Champions League and partly because other sides have had the chance to work out the 3-4-2-1 that caused such problems for opponents last season.
But rather than going into the season reinforced, they have gone in diminished, robbed of Nemanja Matic by his sale, of Diego Costa by the breakdown of his relationship with Conte and of Victor Moses by injury. Of the replacements, only Alvaro Morata has offered any evidence he may succeed at the highest level — and he has already been forced to explain comments that he did not see himself staying in London for long.
It is not just personnel, though. That lack of “hunger” Conte identified is palpable. Plenty of teams find it hard to retain their desire after winning a title, but Conte was adept at maintaining standards at Juventus. That Chelsea could play so well in Madrid and then so badly in Rome, just over a month apart, suggests something badly amiss behind the scenes. There have been rumblings suggesting players are unhappy with Conte’s methods. He is very intense and his training repetitive: It is easy to imagine how what is tolerable when results are going well comes to feel burdensome when they are not.
Conte himself refused in the summer to extend his contract, merely signing better terms. He, reasonably enough given the frequency with which the club has dismissed managers, seems never to have seen Chelsea as a long-term project.
Given the upheaval of the past month, the playing out of problems many highlighted in the summer, it feels as if the drift to departure may already have begun.