Xabi Alonso's first match in the Chelsea dugout turned into a ten-goal fairground ride, and it took a nine-minute hat-trick from substitute João Pedro to spare the new manager an opening-night embarrassment. Chelsea beat Western Sydney Wanderers 6-4 at Accor Stadium in Sydney, in a pre-season friendly that swung five times before the Brazilian settled it late on.
It did not look like it would need rescuing early on. Chelsea led inside six minutes through Dastan Satpayev, only for the Australian side to hit back twice, through Anthony Pantazopoulos and then a second from Hammond, to turn the game around before half-time. Dario Essugo pulled Chelsea level again just before the break with a goal in the 38th minute.
The chaos continued after the interval. Jamie Gittens put Chelsea back in front in the 66th minute, but Western Sydney would not go away, replying through Dylan Scicluna and Awan Lual to leave the Premier League side trailing 4-3 with the clock running down.
That is when Alonso's half-time reshuffle paid off. The Spaniard had used the friendly to test a young, experimental XI before sending on a wave of first-team regulars, and among them was João Pedro, whose introduction changed the entire complexion of the match.
The Brazilian forward, signed from Brighton last year and one of Chelsea's most productive forwards through the second half of last season, scored three times inside nine minutes — in the 80th, 85th and 89th — to turn a 4-3 deficit into a 6-4 win and hand Alonso victory in his managerial bow.
ONE, reporting on the match from Israel, framed it as an evening of "plenty of praise for the attack, but no shortage of question marks for defense" — a fair summary of a game in which Chelsea's back line conceded four times in a glorified training exercise even as their forwards ran riot.
Alonso, who officially replaced Enzo Maresca at Stamford Bridge on 1 July, is using the pre-season tour of Australia to assess his squad depth before the new Premier League campaign, with Chelsea scheduled to play Tottenham Hotspur in their next tour fixture.
Results in pre-season friendlies count for little in the standings, but for a manager taking his first steps at a new club, an entertaining win — however scrappy defensively — is a far easier story to tell than a defeat, and João Pedro's burst of finishing gave Alonso exactly that.
