Chelsea have had a bumpy ride in preseason so far, drawing a game, winning a game and then losing against Kawasaki Frontale on Friday.
After what have really been just fitness exercises so far, we take things up to another level when we take on Barcelona tomorrow.
That gives us a great chance to improve on what we’ve seen so far. The first thing we’d like to see done better would be playing the players for longer. So far the vast majority have been playing 45 chunks. Now it’s time to start building up towards 90 minutes.
That will naturally lead into the second – more fluidity. All the friendly games so far have seen us play well for a spell and then become ragged thanks to a raft of subs. We can eliminate that tomorrow too.
Finally, we want to see a move towards a solid XI from Frank Lampard. There’s still a lot of experimenting to be done; but we want to feel like we’ve come out of this game having made significant progress towards working out our first team for the future.
