Chelsea could find Sarri breakthrough in Friday’s meeting — report

June 22nd has arrived, and the only reason this date is semi-significant in recent Chelsea history is that this is the latest we’ve gone in any Abramovich Era summer without knowing who the Chelsea head coach will be for next season. And sure, we technically do have a coach, but it would be very awkward to keep Conte at this point, as much as I personally would love for him to stay.

On this day in 2011, Chelsea announced the appointment of Andre Villas-Boas with immediate effect. As this summer, the club’s transfer activities waited then too until the new head coach had been confirmed — Courtois (sign & loan), Romeu, Lukaku, Mata, and Meireles followed, though all but two of those moves were made in mid-to-late August. That will not be possible this year as the transfer window no longer ends on the final day of August but rather on August 9, before the season starts.

So, there’s even more pressure to get things done post haste, but this week’s reports from Italy paint just as leisurely of a picture as we’ve been getting over the past month. Still, there’s some activity going on in the background, surely, and the man at the center of the reporting continues to provide his daily updates. Here’s Pedulla’s latest, which takes some deciphering.

The broken, presumably auto-translated English tells of another meeting (summit) today. Then things get a bit murky. “There could also be the coach, a close turn”. A close turn? Why do we care about Sarri’s turning radius?

Translating “a close turn” back to Italian gives us “una svolta stretta” and plugging that into a phrase/context-based dictionary gives us “breakthrough” as one of the options. “Svolta” can also mean “turning point”, and “a close turning point” is a roundabout way of saying that a potential breakthrough is on the horizon. I could be way off, but context.reverso.net is still a fun website.

So.

Chelsea meeting with (Napoli? Sarri? Representatives?) today and there could finally be a breakthrough. What kind of breakthrough? A final breakthrough? Who knows. But it would be in-line with Pedulla’s reporting earlier this week, which promised no further developments until Thursday or Friday at the earliest.

Tick-tock.