Chelsea and the problem with relying on African players

This morning I watched Chelsea put together another frustrating 0-0 outing against a middling team (to a team that's allowed more goals than anyone outside the bottom 5).  It highlighted what's become a semi-annual theme for this team: the January lull.  And the reason for that, I think, is the way Chelsea's teams have been constructed.  More than any other big side in Europe, Chelsea relies on African players as core pieces.  Now, when most soccer fans think of Chelsea's success in the Abramovich era, they think of John Terry and Frank Lampard.  And those two have certainly played a valuable part.  But I'd argue that the most indispensable pieces haven't been Terry and Lamps, but rather Didier Drogba and Michael Essien.  The case for Drogba is pretty straightforward-- he's an absolute beast.  On his day, he was (and still is, really) unplayable.  Drogba is big, he's great in the air, he moves exceptionally well for a guy his size, he has one of the best shots in Europe, and he can create opportunities out of thin air.  Essien's case is a bit harder to make now, since he seems to spend 2/3 of every season injured.  But, 3-4 years ago, you could make a pretty good case that he belonged in the top 10 players in the world.  Essien was fantastic-- he covered a ridiculous amount of ground, was a very good tackler, got forward well, scored goals, and could play any position, from attacking center mid, to right back, to center back.  Most guys who can play that many positions are at best decent at all of them-- Essien was passable as a center-back, good as a right-back, and easily one of the 5 best central midfielders in the world.  He was a special player.

So why is relying on these two guys such a huge problem? The answer is, simply, the Africa Nations Cup.  The ANC is the worst tournament in global soccer.  Where most international tournaments occur every 4 years (World Cup, Euro) or, at worst, semi-irregularly (Copa America), the ANC happens every other year. And, where rational tournaments play during the summer, the ANC is in January.  In other words, smack in the middle of the season for all of Europe's biggest leagues.  Meaning that, every other year, top teams ship all their African players (because just about every African player good enough to play for an elite European club is also playing for his national team) away for the month of January.  For most clubs, that meant, at worst, 1 central player, and maybe a peripheral player or two (Barca in its day would lose Samuel Eto'o and, for a brief minute, Yaya Toure and/or Seydou Keita; Arsenal would lose some combination of Emmanuel Adebayor, Alex Song and Kolo Toure, who were never all key players at the same time; etc.), Chelsea would lose 2 of its most important players, plus a few guys who were in and out of the first XI (John Obi Mikel, Salomon Kalou).

This post isn't really as responsive to today's match as it is to the last few years (Essien didn't go to Africa this year, as he's retired from the international game, and just came back from a knee injury anyway), but the idea hit me over the head again today, as I watched Chelsea struggle to unlock a pretty weak defense and wondered what might have been different if Drogba, instead of the struggling Fernando Torres had been leading the line.