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N’Golo Kanté rules the Premier League by fear
By
Zito Madu
@_Zeets on Aug 29, 2016, 12:52p
13
Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
One of the smallest men in the Premier League is also its most terrifying player.
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Dictators rule by fear, it’s the only path available for absolute power. And the trick of fear is that a lot of its effects can’t be measured in base statistics. It negates actions, so the true extent of it is in what is not done, the destroyed possibilities, rather than the physical reactions. It’s the restriction of freedoms. So that the lost social opportunities that come with Agoraphobia are more damning than the tears after the fear is proven true.
A great example of this came in the second half of
Chelsea vs.
Burnley on Saturday. George Boyd received the ball from a defender in the 61st minute, just a few feet down from the right side of the center circle. He turned upfield and drove into the cavern of space afforded to him by the Chelsea midfield. He almost made it out of the circle before N’Golo Kanté faced him.
All Kanté did was to take a step towards the Burnley man and Boyd stopped his progress. He immediately turned to the left and passed the ball down. Burnley then tried to build the play from the left wing, avoiding having to pass through the middle by crossing into the box or switching to the other flank.
That’s true power. Immeasurable but very obvious. The fear isn’t unreasonable or irrational either. For most of the match Burnley were pinned inside their half of the field. Chelsea were running circles around them. The match had the aura of a preseason game where a first-division team plays an unknown group of part-timers for fitness and maybe exposure into an untapped market.
There was a clear cycle. Chelsea would attack, shoot at goal or get an opportunity to shoot at goal before being thwarted by the keeper, a miscue or a last-ditch tackle -- sometimes this failed and Chelsea scored. Burnley would clear their lines or restart play, only to be dispossessed within a few seconds of having the ball. There seemed to be an invisible wall that blocked them from crossing the halfway line.
Except that it wasn’t a wall. It was a small Frenchman.
Kanté was the man wearing the boots that pressed Burnley heads against the concrete. Every time they tried to break forward, to relieve pressure, he was there to end those hopes. Whether it was outmuscling forwards as they tried to hold the ball, tackling midfielders or using the byline as a trap to win possession from wingers, he was omnipresent. But it wasn’t just down to his physical game, he seemed to have a sense of precognition or telepathy that allowed him to be there as the play threatened to develop. He would stop it cleanly, return the ball to his forwards and Burnley would be on the defense again.
And when he didn’t win the ball back directly, he hassled the attackers until they ran themselves into a circle of Chelsea players who then converged. It was stressful to watch. At Leicester, he was the best midfielder in the league for the above reasons, but now at Chelsea, paired with Nemanja Matic, who is as forceful as any other on his day, Kanté now rules with an iron fist.
The Burnley players who were even more frustrated by this than any fan could be then began to avoid having to deal with Kanté entirely. Rather than continuing on the impossible path, which would have been insanity, they tried to play around and over him. Which, given the fact that it meant that they had to avoid the center of the field, was just sad to watch.
This presents a moral crisis. A decent human being can’t sit there and watch the weak -- Burnley -- struggle against an unforgiving power like Kanté and be comfortable. You can only stomach seeing Boyd turn away from his ambition of going forward, or Andre Gray being pushed off the ball for so long before having to confront your own sense of humanity.
Ninety minutes of watching a collection of hopeful-but-doomed men try to free themselves from the dungeon of their own defensive third, only to be kicked back down by Kanté, and promptly subjected to the torture of defending Eden Hazard, Diego Costa, Willian, Oscar and even Matic. It was pitiful.
The difficult part was that it’s hard to see Kanté as a ruthless and unforgiving enforcer. He looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly. But that’s the power of propaganda, something that Chelsea and their players have historically been good at. Oscar, for one, has used the fact that he has the cutest face ever to distract from his dirty and consistent fouling. Costa and his transgressions are such a part of his image that incidents that would see other players carded or sent off are otherwise disregarded as Costa being Costa. And who can forget the happy face of Michael Essien that hid his penchant for negating an entire zone of the field or the effect of the opponent’s best player. Cesc Fàbregas and Barcelona were witnesses to that.
By being part of the Leicester team of destiny, which was composed of cast-offs and those overlooked in the footballing world, Kanté has been portrayed as a hero. A proper feel-good story. An unknown man rising from Ligue 2 to lead a team that was almost relegated the year before to the Premier League crown. Claudio Ranieri, Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez all shared a similar tale.
But he’s no longer on Leicester and that facade is slowly falling apart. At Chelsea and alongside the equally authoritarian Antonio Conte, this once-revered man is becoming something truly terrifying. Three games into the season and his full power and the effects of it is being realized. It’s no longer something that draws awe and wonder, but as the Burnley players have found out first-hand, Kanté is to be feared and avoided when possible.
As a neutral, Kanté is marvelous to watch. He does the job of an entire midfield almost effortlessly and grants an unbelievable amount of freedom to his cohorts. You are then treated to watching Hazard, Oscar, Costa and the rest of the team at their best. The defense is hardly ever stretched with his as their protection.
But there’s no neutrality here. Just a show of force against the weak and the moral dilemma that comes with seeing it. The end of the match was the best thing that could happen to the Burnley players, it freed them from their hell, but Kanté will do the same to the next team. And the team after that, and the ones after that, until he gets to yours. And then you will witness just how incredible his ability is, and how saddening, but also, very hilarious -- that might be perverse -- it is to watch professional footballers run away from a tiny little man with red boots.
