Graham Potter and Chelsea still searching for a plan amid the chaos

S o, that plan. Everyone wants to see the plan, to see the world in a grain of sand, to see the nuts and bolts of a sophisticated modern footballing philosophy in a promising 15-minute spell either side of the break. The truth is, there is no plan yet. Just the kind of mid-tempo chaos you get when you are still at the thick end of one of the most audacious experiments ever seen in elite football. The bottom line is that Chelsea still can’t keep the ball and they still can’t keep it out. Everything else is bubbling test tubes and incomplete data.

There were 21 shots in the 1-0 defeat at Dortmund, which is at least something. João Félix probably should have had a couple of goals, Gregor Kobel made several fine saves for the hosts and, naturally for a Graham Potter team, the xG was off the charts. You might even argue that this was the sort of game Chelsea deserved to win. All the same, they keep failing to win them, largely because they keep doing the sort of things that teams do when they have no map, no structure to fall back on, no collective consciousness to drag them through the tough bits.

It was telling that with 20 minutes remaining, Potter reached for Marc Cucurella and Mason Mount: his tried and trusted toys. Mount made one fine tackle high up the pitch to create an opening; Cucurella, by contrast, wandered around like a man who had just stumbled out of a house fire. Booed when he came on and hounded every time he got the ball, there was a kind of pathos to him here: a £50m footballer who no longer really knows what any of this means, who no longer knows what the plan is here.

But of course these things work both ways. Opponents can’t really work you out if you don’t know what you’re doing yourself. If you’re a