It has not been the smoothest start to life at Chelsea for £35m summer signing Danny Drinkwater, who arrived on transfer deadline day to help flesh out the midfield corps, which was left severely short-handed after losing Nemanja Matić to Manchester United. Drinkwater had spent much of the summer injured, and then picked up an entirely different injury almost as soon as he arrived. He didn’t make his Chelsea debut until the end of October and he didn’t make his first Premier League start until a month later. Limited t just barely over 300 minutes so far, yesterday’s match was just his third start in the league all season — he does ave two more in the League Cup.
With Conte reuniting Leicester City’s title-winning midfield duo of Drinkwater and N’Golo Kanté, Chelsea were off and running barely minutes into the one-sided contest against Stoke City, with Drinkwater’s goal in the 9th minute doubled Chelsea’s lead and already put the points well out of reach of the hapless visitors. And what a goal it was!
“‘It was alright I suppose. I’m happy with it and it’s good to get off the mark in a Chelsea kit, so happy days. Hopefully there’s a few more on the way.”
Afterwards however, Danny was mostly concentrating on what the team need to do as we head into the new year, though obviously he’s hoping that his just “alright” wonderstrike will help him gain a few more minutes going forward.
“That’s one thing the manager’s been telling us, we need to score more goals in games we are winning and we got five.”
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‘We’re doing well, the more wins we pick up on the bounce the better it is for us. We can’t do much more than win games so as long as we’re doing that we’ll keep the pressure on. If we can take some confidence from into the Arsenal match that’s brilliant. It’s obviously a completely different game altogether but we’ll do our work on them and hopefully we’ll be ready.”
-Danny Drinkwater; source: Chelsea FC
With Chelsea set to face Arsenal at least three times in January, Drinkwater will undoubtedly get a chance or two to put them to the sword as well.