Chelsea star reveals midfielders desire to leave Chelsea and move to Manchester United.

Antonio Conte and his Chelsea team welcome Jose Mourinho and Manchester United to Stamford Bridge on Sunday afternoon with the attention ahead of this game on just one player - Nemanja Matic. 

I have said it before on here and I will say it again, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with all the focus being on Matic and the fact that people believe if he was still at Chelsea, we would not have the same problems that we do now. Statements such as that are purely hypothetical and no-one would ever know what the situation would have been here if he remained at the club.

Of course once again with another poor performance from the blues, this time in Rome losing 3-0 in the Champions League in what can only be described as a truly dire performance, pundits such as Phil Neville have come out and claimed that whoever let Nemanja Matic leave the building should be sacked.

I have said many times that Matic refused to sign a new extension to his contract at Chelsea and indicated that he wanted to leave to re-join Jose Mourinho up north at United. Once a player has re-iterated a desire to leave, there is no point keeping them here.

This has been confirmed by Thibaut Courtois in a recent interview. When asked of Matic he said:

"Those are questions you need to ask to the people who made that happen. If a player nowadays wants to go to a team, then he has – I don’t want to say the power – but if he has a strong will to leave and join another team then it is hard for the club.

You cannot just ignore him and say ‘you cannot leave’ because then you have a disappointed player who won’t play at his best. So obviously for us you give a player to another big team, but they are choices that are made in football and we have some quality midfielder, so I hope we can show on Sunday that we are better.

We know Nemanja’s qualities, he is someone who last year gave us the balance as well. He decided to go to another team, so we won’t live in the past. Our midfield is very good, we have very strong players so I don’t know if we miss him. But if you have two injuries in midfield, then, of course, you can say yeah we miss Nemanja because he is another quality player and he is doing well in Manchester.” - Source: The Independent.

The thing is, when Chelsea play well and put in a fantastic performance as we did in Madrid by beating them 2-1 in the Champions League, people forget to criticise and talk of Matic because on the day N'Golo Kante and Tiemoue Bakayoko were outstanding alongside Cesc Fabregas. There was no talk of us missing Matic at all. It's only when we have a poor performance and result that people will talk of those that have left the club last summer.

I sincerely hope that N'Golo Kante is able to play on Sunday against United to form a three-man midfield in front of our tried and trusted back three from last season. We need to revert back to basics as stated here to ensure we stop the rot as far as conceding goals goes.

If Antonio Conte decides to play Bakayoko, Drinkwater and Kante in this one and Chelsea win the game, maybe then talk of how much we apparently miss Matic will stop.

I personally believe we have a better player in Bakayoko in his place and time will prove as such.