The impossible Cole Palmer xG stats from first 60 minutes against Southampton | OneFootball

Cole Palmer’s career at Chelsea so far has basically been a case of him overperforming in every possible way.

Every shot has gone in, every pass has come off, it’s been magical.  But regression to the mean is a thing – and we’re seeing it in quite ridiculous fashion here. Palmer has twanged like a rubber band – from every shot from everywhere on the pitch going in, to nothing falling for him.

The last few games have seen it become a self fulfilling prophecy too. The longer he goes without a goal, the more he’s snatching at chances and making bad decisions. There was a perfect example tonight just before the Blues opened the scoring. One on one, Palmer chose to shoot rather than pass it to Christopher Nkunku with an open goal ahead of him.

If Palmer didn’t feel he was desperate to score and was thinking straight, he would have just rolled it to his teammate. Thankfully the corner that resulted from Palmer’s shot being saved was headed in, by none other than Nkunku himself.

Palmer just needs one to go in to restore his confidence

As the saying goes, Palmer just needs one to go in off his backside. But the numbers are really getting preposterous – he’s has 0.97 Expected Goals in his chances in the first hour of this game alone. And we’d say that’s being generous, given the pick of the bunch was a one on one you’d expect him to score 99 times out of 100.

“The majority of Chelsea’s chances have fallen at his feet and he has missed three good chances and two half-chances,” Nizaar Kinsella wrote for the BBC.

There’s plenty of time for him to get that goal tonight – but he gave a wry smile after his last effort, spooned over the bar, which made him look rather resigned to this not being his night.