Letting Fernando Torres lead the line was Roberto Di Matteo’s first big mistake

 
Up and down: Fernando Torres looks off the pace as Carlos Tevez makes an impressive return for City
22 March 2012

Roberto Di Matteo knew his honeymoon period as Chelsea’s interim first-team-coach wouldn’t last forever but the Italian has only himself to blame for it ending last night.

The momentum he started to build, with four straight victories since replacing Andre Villas-Boas, is now at risk because he got the one big decision regarding team selection at Etihad Stadium wrong.

Di Matteo is not the first Chelsea manager to pay the price for believing £50million Fernando Torres could make the difference in a blue shirt (although in Manchester he was actually in the club’s black away strip).

Predecessors Carlo Ancelotti and Villas-Boas both gave Torres many chances to prove his worth only to be disappointed.

It is one of the factors why they are no longer at Stamford Bridge and Di Matteo is aware his time in charge is only temporary, with a permanent successor to Villas-Boas to be named in the summer.

However, with Chelsea having high hopes of finishing in the top four in the table and attempting to win the FA Cup and Champions League, the 41-year-old has a great opportunity to make a mark as a manager in the same way he did as a player at the club.

Of course, he still has the chance to achieve those things but to succeed he must work out which games are more suited to Torres and the ones where Didier Drogba must lead the line instead.

Clearly, Di Matteo was seduced by the Spain striker’s display against Leicester in the FA Cup three days earlier and there is no doubt his two goals and two assists were impressive.

But a home game against a Championship side is one thing, playing away at a club going for the championship and boasting a 100 per cent League record on their own ground this season is quite another.

Yet Torres was surprisingly given the berth up front against Roberto Mancini’s men rather than Drogba, who had bullied far superior opposition in Napoli a week before.

Considering City were without first-choice central defenders Joleon Lescott and captain Vincent Kompany through injury, it made Di Matteo’s choice all the more baffling.

Mancini must have feared the new partnership of Micah Richards and Kolo Toure lining up against a resurgent Drogba, only to breathe a sigh of relief when the Ivory Coast international took his place on the bench.

While Di Matteo may have been saving the 34-year-old for Saturday’s derby against fourth-placed Spurs, Drogba’s presence against a makeshift back four could have ensured his team were going into the game just two points behind rather than five.

It is not as if Torres didn’t work hard. Indeed there was the occasional flash of renewed confidence like when he went on a good run before setting up Juan Mata with a clear view of goal in the eighth minute only for the former Valencia midfielder to shoot wide.

But it was few and far between and City’s back four found it too easy to knock him off the ball and keep Chelsea’s attacks at a minimum.

As Di Matteo had set his side up with a defensive approach in a 4-2-3-1 formation, keeping possession of the ball was crucial but it kept coming back toward Petr Cech’s goal all too regularly and Torres was often the cause of that.

While Drogba would have taken the battle to Richards and Toure, Torres seemed to lack the fight last night and would look to referee Mike Dean in the desperate hope of being given a free-kick.

His biggest show of emotion was actually when he appeared to have a heated exchange with Di Matteo in the first half and when he was substituted for Drogba with 17 minutes to go.

The manager defended his decision to start with Torres rather than Drogba and also tried to focus on the positives of the last fortnight rather than the negatives of the defeat.

“I just thought that for the dynamic of the team it was going to be the right decision,” he said. “This defeat is a setback for us but we look forward to the future. Two weeks ago we were seven points behind third place, now we are six. We need to look at these things because we are going in the right direction.”

Although Torres will rightly point out that Chelsea were leading 1-0 when he went off, it had little to do with his contribution and Gary Cahill’s goal on the hour owed a lot to fortune due to a deflection from Yaya Toure.

Chelsea lacked the impetus up front to claim a telling second and City, who had been largely unimpressive despite hitting the bar twice, equalised through Sergio Aguero’s penalty in the 78th minute following Michael Essien’s handball.

Inevitably the stage was then set for the pantomime villain Carlos Tevez, who had come on as a substitute by this point to a mixed reception in what was his first appearance for the home side in six months, to set up the winner with a fine pass to Samir Nasri.

It was the kind of quality Torres still possesses but Di Matteo must think more wisely when is the right time and place to take a gamble on it if he is to have something to celebrate come May.

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