Antonio Conte's Chelsea eager to take revenge and put memories of Arsenal defeat behind them

Antonio Conte obviously won’t come out and say it, but the unmistakable feeling from everyone around Chelsea in the last few days has been that Arsenal should be ready for a fierce backlash. There’s just been that controlled intensity around Cobham, that sense of readiness to rectify something.

The Italian will willingly say that that ‘something’ - specifically, the nature of September’s 3-0 defeat at the Emirates - was “a shock”. So much so, in fact, that he repeated the word four times when asked.

“Yes, for me it was a shock for sure,” Conte said. “When this happened, it was a shock for me. I tried to transfer this shock onto my players, to avoid it happening again in the future, to repeat it. For sure, though, it was a great shock for me.”

It obviously had a great impact on him, too. Earlier on in his Friday press conference, Conte had even admitted he still dwells on that humiliation. “It was a bad defeat, 3-0 after the first half, and in my mind, it’s always present, this defeat. I hope also in the minds of my players.”

Conte should have no worries about that. Those close to the Chelsea squad say it especially irritated the players to lose to a team they so often beat, particularly in the humiliating way that it happened. Nine of the 14 players Conte used that day had never actually been on a pitch during a competitive defeat to Arsenal outside of the 2015 Community Shield. They are determined to restore that old order to the rivalry.

For a demanding perfectionist like Conte, though, it seems like it was the sense of disorder from the September performance that really pained him. You could understand why. He was less used to a situation like that than the Chelsea players were. While they may not have lost to Arsenal in a competitive game since October 2011, the Italian hadn’t lost any competitive game by three goals since October 2010, when his Siena were beaten 3-0 away to Empoli. Worse was the exact nature of the Emirates match, and how Chelsea were completely wiped out by half-time.

“Usually, my teams are not used to conceding three goals after the first half,” Conte said. “I don’t want this. We work a lot to avoid this.”

The one other three-goal aberration in those six years was when Conte’s Italy lost 4-1 to Germany in a Euro 2016 warm-up match but, aside from the fact that was a mere friendly as he tried to figure out his best team for France, memory of that was cleansed by their actual performances at the tournament itself.

That’s the thing with this game, too. Beyond the fact it was Arsenal that beat the Chelsea players in such a way, it feels like Conte himself wants to right that wrong, to cleanse the record of his season by having an appropriate response to a game like that.

The grand irony is that, when it eventually comes to the entire record of Conte’s time at Stamford Bridge, that Arsenal match might well be one of the key moments. It might well be what Paul Breitner once described to The Independent as “one of the most important defeats you can have”.

The German great had been talking about how Bayern Munich’s 4-0 defeat to Ajax in March 1973 was a crucial match in the development of the team into repeat European champions, because the severity of the humiliation brought instant clarity over what was required to take the next step. “You understand what you have, or what you have to improve.”

That Arsenal defeat undeniably offered a moment of clarity for Conte, and perhaps even more starkly than had been realised. The 47-year-old’s switch to 3-4-3 in the second half of that game has been much discussed this season, but less known was that Chelsea had barely even practised it before then. He claimed on Friday that the change during the game was “the first time” it had been used.

“I’d like to tell you the truth: in my mind, there was this option. I knew that I had the players… but we’d never tried this solution in our training sessions. I always played with four at the back, then 4-2-4, 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3...” Then, finally, in a game where everything was going wrong, he played with a 3-4-3 that ensured everything just fitted so well.

A further irony, however, is that it would be wrong to say it immediately clicked. That actually took another week, and the in-game tests of another Premier League match. If Conte had never worked on 3-4-3 as his primary system before the trip to the Emirates, they properly began in the week after it, but still found problems. It didn’t actually work that well in training sessions, and some of the players didn’t really know where to run. The manager’s hands-on instructions hadn’t yet sunk in, and some felt they weren’t ready to use it in a game.

That seemed all too obvious at half-time of the very next match against Hull City, as Chelsea toiled 0-0 at half-time. Willian then scored on the hour, Diego Costa followed, and the team’s time had seemingly come.

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It was a classic case of the simple confidence provided by a win also offering just enough trust in more complex ideas to make them properly cohere. From there, Chelsea’s 3-4-3 has been so coherent that it seems nothing - not defeats to Spurs, not controversy over Diego Costa - can really disrupt it.

Conte does not just want coherence on Saturday, though. He wants full conviction, and maybe more on top of that. “Arsenal beat us already in the first game, and they have the possibility to repeat this in this game. For this reason, we must be focused, stay in great concentration, and have the same anger, the same will to fight and try to win.”

Anger; will to fight. Conte won’t admit it, but they certainly sound like the words of a man out to prove a point.