3️⃣ points after Chelsea hang on at home to Leicester | OneFootball

Frank Lampard’s wait for his first win as Chelsea manager goes on following Sunday’s 1-1 draw with Leicester.

Here are three things we learned from an entertaining end-to-end afternoon at Stamford Bridge …

José Mourinho was wrong about Mason Mount

“You look to the performance of Mason Mount, the performance of Tammy Abraham, you look to the performance even of [Andreas] Christensen and for matches of this dimension you need a little bit more.”

That was the assessment of former Chelsea boss José Mourinho in his role as a Sky Sports pundit after last Sunday’s 4-0 defeat at Old Trafford.

His criticism of Mount in particular – mild though it was – baffled many onlookers, not least Frank Lampard who, when asked about it in his post-match press conference responded: “He didn’t like the performance of Mason Mount? Is that what he said? Did he? Wow.”

One week on and Mourinho must surely have been impressed by what he saw from Mount against Leicester.

The 20-year-old academy graduate was full of pressing, dribbling and technical quality in his senior Stamford Bridge debut and took his seventh minute goal excellently after picking Wilfred Ndidi’s pocket on the edge of the Leicester box.

And how fitting it was that the first home goal of the Lampard era was scored by a young player repaying his manager’s faith.

There will no doubt be plenty more where that one came from.

Playing out from the back is admirable but perilous

Pep Guardiola was repeatedly told during his first season in the Premier League that passing out from the back would never work in English football.

But three years down the line, Manchester City have got it down to a fine art and it seems every team in the top flight is trying to emulate Guardiola’s philosophy.

Leicester found out the hard way in this game that it isn’t as easy as it looks, however.

To do it well, you need two technically gifted centre-backs and a defensive midfielder with eyes in the back of his head. It also takes a hell of a lot of practice.

Whether Ndidi didn’t get a shout or was just too slow to react to Mount haring up behind him, it was an incredibly poor and totally avoidable error.

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple and putting your foot through the ball.

But the Nigerian at least redeemed himself by bagging the equaliser later in the game.

Leicester should have nicked it

If you’ll forgive the cliché, this was the dictionary definition of a game of two halves.

Chelsea were by far the better side as they made their opponents look decidedly ordinary in the first half and they probably should have gone in at the break 2-0 up.

But in the second half, the roles were reserved as the Foxes pressed the hosts higher up the pitch and were able to fashion a number of good chances before and after their equaliser.

Leicester’s goal was coming for a while as they began to dominate the midfield and Lampard perhaps showed a bit of inexperience when his idea to address the problem was substituting Olivier Giroud for Tammy Abraham.

At 1-1, James Maddison and Jamie Vardy both missed golden opportunities to score while Youri Tielemans was uncharacteristically wasteful in possession.

The stats say both sides shared the possession 50/50 and Chelsea had five shots on target to Leicester’s three, but it’s Brendan Rodgers who will probably be the more disappointed of the two managers when all is said and done.

This wasn’t a bad result or performance from Chelsea but more clinical opposition probably would have finished them off in that second half, and they’ve got a lot to work on if they want to finish in the top four again anytime soon.