Tuchel’s strange sacking only makes sense if you are in charge of Chelsea

Some continuity, finally, at Chelsea Football Club. Sacking your manager seven games into the season, with more than £250m spent on players and a couple of whispered wobbles behind the scenes. This feels like home, safety, a club coming back to what they know. Nature is healing itself.

As of Wednesday morning 10am Chelsea no longer have Tommy Tuchel. Tuchel no longer, in the view of the board, knows exactly what they need. But it seems Graham Potter just might, if Chelsea really do feel like taking a punt on talent, brains and method over having actually spent a single minute of your professional career at the level the club hope to operate at.

An announcement is expected, and there will be time, so much time, to chew over that succession. But for now it is a case of Vale Thomas. Let us lay that hollow-eyed, skinny-ankled ghost to rest. Because whatever the scales of justice here Tuchel’s time at Chelsea has been truly extraordinary; just as his sacking tells us something quite profound about the direction of travel at this point.

In all Tuchel lasted 595 days, just a few more than Frank Lampard. His tenure took in one major honour (the most major of all), three final defeats, two distinct ownership regimes – denim-clad oligarch-bro Russian billionaire versus denim-clad investor-bro US billionaire – plus of course those three months of unprecedented geopolitical oddity, during which the manager of Chelsea was required to comment publicly on issues ranging from the moral equivalence of European and Middle Eastern conflict in the context of UK arms sales to Marcos Alonso’s ability to operate in a high pressing 3-4-3 system.

Factor in his glassy-eyed soul-sickness in Zagreb, some personal issues since moving to London, and