Graham Potter passes his first home Chelsea test with flying colours

Graham Potter has passed his first big test as the Chelsea manager but Milan, one of the grandest names in football, simply didn’t turn up.

If a home debut may be considered the first true test of a new manager, Graham Potter’s ended in a resounding pass. Potter cut a singular figure on sidelines in a navy blue jacket and black polo-neck for his , looking a little as though he’d gone through the wrong entrance while looking for a sociology lecture, but the ease with which his Chelsea team brushed Milan aside suggested that he has hit the ground running after his high-profile defection from Brighton, that his methods can work as effectively at the elite level as they did a rung or two further down the football food chain.

There was little question that this fixture mattered to Chelsea. A weak start to their Champions League campaign, just a single point from their first two matches, had left them bottom of their group, and fifteen minutes before the teams came out off the tension edged up another notch with the news that RB Salzburg had picked up their first win of the group stage in their earlier kick-off against Dinamo Zagreb. A failure on Chelsea’s part to match that win would leave them at least three points adrift of second place with just three matches left, and their next match in this competition being the return match in Milan, in just six days times.

But it was also a big night for Potter. His Premier League debut against Crystal Palace had, eventually, worked out for him. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang scored his first goal, Potter introduced Connor Gallagher as a substitute and the former Palace loanee scored the winning goal with two minutes to play. A goal for all narrative. It wasn’t a sparkling performance against a Palace team that has been coughing and spluttering this last few weeks, but there were enough positives to take from it to reasonably call it a good day at the office.

But this was a home match, his home debut, and Stamford Bridge, where the crowd is about as close to the pitch as it’s possible to be, was crackling with nervous energy beforehand, a skittishness fed by banks of Milan supporters tucked away in one corner of the ground, almost entirely dressed in black, making an awful lot of noise. These large travelling supports add a splash of occasion to every match, but it was a tetchy and somewhat scrappy opening, with the two teams largely cancelling each other out, Milan nominally the better side.

But when…