Maurizio Sarri looks like yet another doomed Chelsea manager

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Tactically Naive. The weekly football column that believes the children are our future.

Tactically Naive doesn’t know whose idea it was to spread the FA Cup weekend out over four days, but we’d like them to stop. By the time we get to the fifth round, a mere eight matches, the action starts to seem thin, like butter scraped over too much bread.

This is particularly true when the Big Game, the one with all the money and the managers who might get sacked, is kept back for Monday night. Stick it in the middle of the weekend, and it becomes the tentpole of a fun time at the circus. Stick it at the end, and everything else becomes a trailer.

Anyway, Manchester United went to Chelsea Monday night, which was good for the BBC and very expensive for the traveling fans. And United beat Chelsea, quite convincingly. Good for fans of Paul Pogba and Ander Herrera, but very bad for Chelsea’s manager, Maurizio Sarri.

Sarri is an ideologue, and ideologues are fascinating. He believes in his methods, in Sarriball. He believes it works. And like all ideologues, there is a remarkable, vaguely terrifying confidence at the heart of this all: I have solved football. Get on my level.

Of course, ironclad beliefs don’t always survive contact with reality, and of all the big clubs in the Premier League, Chelsea are the most brutally realistic. Abramovich has made a virtue out of managerial churn: a revolving door that spits out managers and trophies at roughly the same rate. This has many consequences, but the most important one here is that Sarri isn’t going to get a couple of seasons to spread the good word of his gospel. It takes immediately, or it doesn’t take at all.

Or he changes. Maybe. Just a little bit. Is there something more useful that N’Golo Kante could be doing? Is there some way of protecting, liberating, or dropping Jorginho? Is there some way of translating all this possession into actual shots on goal? A look at the statistics for the second half against United is instructive here: Chelsea had 137 percent of possession, but Sergio Romero was able to complete three sudoku and file his tax return.

Obviously there’s a paradox in there. A whiplash turn from “This football you play is brilliant. Would you like a job?” to “Quick! Quick! Play something else!” But that’s the nature of realism: it takes its cue from circumstances. And the circumstances at Chelsea are that Sarri has a squad beneath him, and an owner above him, that are both extremely comfortable with the idea of managerial disposability.

But what if Sarri digs in and there is no Sarriball 2.0, nor Sarriball 0.9, from here on out. Just Sarriball, over and over. It would be a noble way to go, perhaps. Willian on for Pedro. Barkley on for Kovacic. Zappacosta on for Azpilicueta. In the belief that he is right. In the hope that Abramovich and the players will extend to him the patience he needs.

In the sure and certain knowledge that they won’t.

A 1-0 win is always a close one. 2-0 is generally comfortable. 3-0 takes you into “sound beating” territory. Anything above 4-0 starts to look very one-sided.

5-0 is probably where “thrashing” begins, and that takes us on through six and seven. Then eight is where a game starts to unmoor from reality. Eight goals or more, and things have got weird.

Italy, this weekend, had a 20-0.

The highlights are down at the bottom, if you can bear to watch them. It’s basically a snuff film. TN’s favourite bit comes at 6-0, when the Pro Piacenza goalkeeper starts to think about remonstrating with his defence — that’s what goalkeepers are for, after all — before realising that there really isn’t a whole lot of point.

Because Pro Piacenza only fielded seven players. And they were all teenagers. And they had no coaching staff — one of the kids had to do double duty as football’s saddest player-manager. Kudos to him for starting the game a bold 3-1-2 formation.

The club have been fighting financial woes and points penalties all season, and most of their professionals have departed in high dudgeon, claiming up to €500,000 in unpaid wages.

But having forfeited the previous four games, a fifth such cancellation by Pro Piacenza would mean expulsion from Serie C. So out went a handful of children, off to humiliation for the sake of … nothing beyond internet immortality, as it turns out. Pro Piacenza have since been kicked out of the league anyway.

Still, though. 20-0. Should Cuono have stopped after three or four, on the general principle that beating up chlidren is A Bad Look? Or were they right to keep going, in pursuit of glory and inflation? A big win does wonders for the goal difference, after all. Basically an extra point. And nobody wants to be obviously patronising.

In the end they compromised, hammering 15 before half-time and then a genteel, almost respectful five on the other side. But that, too, proved futile: Serie C’s ruling on Pro Piacenza’s expulsion also included the cancellation of the game on the basis that several players were ineligible.

All that plundering, and they only get a 3-0 win. None of this ever happened, and this was not a football match. In every sense.