The Kante Black Hole: Chelsea soars while Leicester struggles

The relegation zone: Remembering Chapocoense: the tragic loss of the Brazilian underdogs

Last Tuesday, the Brazilian club Chapecoense was on the way to Medellin, Colombia to cap off a remarkable season with the first leg of a two-leg tie against Colombian giants Atlético Nacional in the Copa Sudamericana final, the South American equivalent of the Europa League. The moment was supposed to be the culmination of a wild ride that saw the tiny provincial squad fighting their way up the from fourth division of Brazilian soccer in 2009 to battling—and beating—some of the continent’s best sides in this season’s Copa. Instead, the fairytale ended in tragedy when the plane carrying the team crashed into the mountains near Medellin.
Of the 77 passengers on the charter flight from Bolivia to Medellin, 71 were killed in the wreckage, including coaches, technical staff, journalists and 19 of the team’s players. It appears that the plane ran out of fuel over Colombia, with the pilot radioing in a “fuel emergency” moments before crashing, corroborated by the absence of an explosion post impact.
Newspapers and investigators have raised serious questions about the airline Lamia’s fueling protocol in the wake of the crash. The distance between their Bolivian origin and Medellin was slightly outside the plane’s range, and as such, the plane also lacked the 30 minutes of additional fuel aviation experts say is a necessary precaution. Further, the pilot reportedly waved off a refueling stop in Cobija. Lamia’s reputation as a cut-rate charter operator raises further questions about the procedures and is particularly disturbing because the Argentinian National Team flew on the same doomed plane just two weeks before.
Hailing from Chapecó, a small provincial city of 210,000 in the south of Brazil, the Chapecoense had only been a professional side since the mid-1970s. Even before the Copa success, Chape had earned comparisons to Leicester City, the Premier League club who rose from similar lower league obscurity to capture last season’s title.
The club rose through the ranks in Brazil on the back of investments in training facilities and infrastructure and sound management that is rare in Brazilian soccer. This season, Chape was on track to finish a club record ninth in the league before the tragedy. Like Leicester, they found success on the back of journeymen like top scorer Bruno Rangel and captain Cléber Santana, most famous for brief stints at Atlético Madrid and Mallorca in Spain. The story of lovable underdogs clad in green and white punching above their weight and slaying giants like Argentina’s San Lorenzo earned them the admiration of fans continent-wide.
On Monday, the South American Football Confederation, CONMEBOL, declared Chapecoense the winner of the Copa Sudamericana, after Atlético Nacional asked them to award Chape the title to honor the victims of the crash. Other outpourings of support have come from Brazil’s top clubs, who offered to loan players to the club for next season in order to help get them back on their feet.
As tragic and gutting as such an incident may be, the crash will not spell the end of Chapecoense. Albeit to a lesser scale, Manchester United lost eight players to the Munich air disaster in 1958 and eventually rose to even greater heights. Part of what precipitated Chape’s meteoric rise from fourth division obscurity to competing for a major continental championship was their grit and determination, along with sound management. If history is any indicator, the club and its future squad will pull on those same traits to ensure that it and the memory of those lost do not go gentle into that Brazilian night (to paraphrase a better writer than myself).
Arsenal’s Brazilian defender Gabriel Paulista played under Chapecoense manager Caio Júnior and was obviously stricken by the crash. On the verge of tears, he said, “If you think you want to do something, just get out there and do it, because we don’t know what tomorrow brings.” I don’t mean to end on too sentimental a note, but his words seem especially sage in the wake of tragedy. Go out and do something you’ve been putting off today.

The relegation zone

The Kante Black Hole: Chelsea soars while Leicester struggles

February 3, 2017

Here’s a relatively uncontroversial statement: Chelsea will win the Premier League title this season. Even after Tuesday’s 1-1 draw with fellow title contenders Liverpool, the Blues hold a nine-point lead at the top of the table with 15 matches remaining and have been the league’s most consistent and terrifying side.

Here’s a slightly more controversial statement: Leicester City, the defending champions who overcame 5000-to-1 odds to claim a fairytale title, will struggle to avoid relegation this season. The Foxes sit in 16th place, 2 spots and 2 points ahead of the relegation zone, tied on points with Swansea City. It seems ever more likely that Claudio Ranieri’s men will scrap it out for the rest of the season to avoid being the first team in England to be relegated in the season following a title since 1938.

Leicester’s troubles this season are numerous and well-trodden. Striker Jamie Vardy, last year’s snarling, trash-talking player of the season with 24 goals, has banged in just five so far this season. Riyad Mahrez, their maestro on the wing, has likewise been ineffectual after a monster showing in Leicester’s title campaign. Despite these difficulties, probably the largest factor in the squad’s drop-off this season—and Chelsea’s dominance—has been the loss of French midfielder N’Golo Kante, who was traded to Chelsea for £32 million this offseason.

Kante’s impact to Leicester’s championship side is hard to understate. As a hard-tackling, Energizer Bunny of a pivot in central midfield last season, he was relied upon for his aggression and shielded the Foxes’ backline while breaking up the flow of opposing attacks. Despite not quite winning the plaudits of Mahrez or Vardy last season, Kante led the league with 156 interceptions and 175 tackles. It was his constant energy and presence in the center of the park—Ranieri said he “must have a pack full of batteries hidden” away—that allowed their attackers to flourish.

The two clubs’ fortunes this season are inextricably linked to gaining and losing Kante. While Leicester has a Kante-sized hole in its midfield this season, Kante has been nothing short of a black hole in Chelsea’s midfield, gobbling up opposing attacks under new manager Antonio Conte, albeit playing a somewhat different role. He’s still breaking up attacks at a dizzying rate, leading the league in interceptions through mid-January, but has shifted his role from the destroyer who helped spring quick Leicester counters to more of a controlling player in Conte’s dominating 3-4-3 formation.

Since its 3-0 drubbing at the hands of Arsenal in late September, Chelsea has been lined up in the same 3-4-3 formation that Conte used while manager of both Juventus and the Italian National Team. The switch to this formation—which sets Kante playing alongside Nemanja Matic in central midfield—has reaped massive rewards. In the Chelsea midfield, Kante’s energy and motor allow him to shield the back three, while also controlling and balancing the pace of the game from the middle of the park by distributing to the wingbacks and attackers. As a result, he’s making fewer defensive stops—which consist of interceptions, blocks and clearances—per game this season. Instead, he has been a more effective passer with nearly 90 percent pass accuracy.

In Tuesday night’s draw against Liverpool, Kante made an astounding 14 tackles, and yet it seemed like a performance where the stats didn’t tell the full story. As Leicester observers last season so often noted of Kante, he covers the ground of two players, something on full display Tuesday. He was first to seemingly every loose ball in the midfield and was critical in disrupting Liverpool’s offensive rhythm, even as the Reds dominated possession and pressed Chelsea.

Barring a miracle, it’s hard to see any side catching the Blues at the top of the table, especially if the team avenges its early season loss and dispatches of a hot-and-cold Arsenal side in a massive match on Saturday. As it stands, N’Golo Kante is on his way to repeating as Premier League champion and may well be the most valuable—if underappreciated—player in the league.

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