Two years after leaving Bilbao for London, Kepa Arrizabalaga could not find himself in a more critical situation at Chelsea. Holder only because the club has not yet officially announced Edouard Mendy, who will surely arrive this week, that of Ondárroa, beyond a bad run, it has been marked for the English press. Derisively dubbed “Calamity” Kepa by the tabloids, trust in him is nil, and only the high price paid for him, a price no one would come close to now, prevents him from leaving Stamford Bridge. Ahead, hard times, times for reflection, and a time for the 25-year-old to reinvent himself.
“He has made a clear mistake, and he knows it,” Lampard sentenced in the press conference after the game in which his team lost to Liverpool this weekend. A match in which Kepa handed the ball to Mané to make it 0-2 when the Reds were already ahead on the scoreboard and had one more man on the field. “You have to try to give him confidence, because a goalkeeper is based on that. Those things happen”He later tried to fix the English. Nobody is aware, however, that he is the first person who does not like Spanish, and Kepa himself knows that better than anyone.
Those 80 million
A situation that must cause him a constant feeling of overwhelm that has caused, in addition to his own personal failures, that each jump, each divided ball and each stop become a test of his abilities. The price tag, 80 million euros, weighs a lot, and, perhaps he was never so good as to make him the most expensive goalkeeper in history, but perhaps now he is not so bad as to think that he has no wood to succeed in a great European.
The problem is that Chelsea seems to have definitively fed up with their situation and has already signed Mendy as a replacement, who will arrive for about 25 million euros and who will surely have the title from the first moment. Prestigious media such as The Times speak of “despair” at Stamford Bridge and that Rennes will regret not having asked for more for the goalkeeper. “Arrizabalaga did not finish last season and it should not have started this one,” they say. A feeling, that of the British newspaper, which summarizes, in a moderate way, the feeling in England with the Spanish.