Chelsea fans are demanding for Graham Potter to be sacked following the team’s struggles under the former Brighton boss but Chelsea legend Pat Nevin is calling for patience.
According to Nevin, Potter needs time like Mikel Arteta at Arsenal and Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and is hoping the board stick with Potter until the end of the season.
Nevin told Daily Mail: “We like binary situations in the media, don’t we? Graham Potter, should he go or should he stay? That’s not the way I think about it.
“I try to look for underlying positives and negatives. One positive is that only Newcastle have shipped fewer goals than Chelsea this season.
“And Chelsea are not a dull defensive team. They’re playing inventive football, as good as I’ve seen them play for a while. For 35 minutes against Borussia Dortmund, they were really, really special. And if they’re not giving much away, they don’t need to change a huge amount. It feels really close.
“If Potter is your perfect candidate, a coach who builds over time while moulding young players, and if you believe in what you’re doing, you have to be ballsy and see it out.
“Remember what Mikel Arteta went through with Arsenal. People said it wasn’t working, it was dreadful. People also forget Pep Guardiola was battered at Manchester City. It takes a while. You don’t turn around a supertanker in a bath.
“If Chelsea’s owners are brave enough to believe in what they’ve put in place, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them stick with it until the end of the season. They’ve bought a bunch of youngsters. Unbelievably expensive youngsters, but this isn’t a team for now. It’s for two or three years down the line.
“We don’t know what percentage of them will work, but this looks to me like planning — not the scattergun operation when they were signing the likes of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
“But it’s Chelsea. It’s the Premier League. The fans are getting fed up. The ownership are under pressure.
“You don’t have a lot of time and the negatives are you’re halfway down the table and not scoring enough goals.
“Everybody knows they need somebody to put the ball in the net. That would help a wee bit.
“They could go out and sign a striker, but Chelsea’s history of buying strikers at the wrong end of their career is extraordinary.
“They want somebody at the right end of their career who can become like Didier Drogba. I would get Victor Osimhen from Napoli if it was up to me.
“We don’t know what the new owners are thinking. The previous Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, would have got rid of the manager. He just wouldn’t have stuck by him if he found himself in 10th and on this run.
“If the current management team pull the trigger quickly, it’s back to normality with a different manager every year — and a lot of Chelsea fans can probably cope with that. A lot of them want it. I just hope it isn’t the case.”