Antonio Conte running out of road at Chelsea after drab unambitious defeat to Manchester City

Chelsea treated Manchester City with more respect than even champions-elect deserve, their manager seemingly impotent on the touchline

Antonio Conte was unable to divert from an unambitious, unsuccessful Plan A (Getty)

It said a lot that Pep Guardiola spoke of Antonio Conte in terms of his legacy in the days leading up to this match, as if his counterpart’s time at Chelsea could now be assessed comprehensively, as if there was little more of it to come.

“I think Conte is going to leave something to English football,” he said at the Emirates late on Thursday night. “I am sure of that. What Antonio has done here in the Premier League, maybe the people don't realise.”

Guardiola was referring to Conte’s 3-4-2-1 formation, famously first adopted on the same ground early last season. It could not rescue that particular defeat to Arsenal but it would settle Chelsea’s stuttering start and power them on towards the league title, with a trail of inferior copycats left in their wake.

Few, if any half-time tactical tweaks have made such an substantial impact on a Premier League season, both in terms of the title’s destination and the tactics of other top-flight clubs. 17 of last season’s 20 mimicked Conte’s three-at-the-back at some point, but none matched the verve and ingenuity of his Chelsea at their best.

The switch was a moment of inspiration from a manager happy to rip it up and start again, willing to take risk something different, determined to make the best of the tools at his disposal. That all seems like a long time ago now.

At the Etihad on Sunday, Chelsea treated Manchester City with more respect than even champions-elect deserve. Most of the few teams to have caused City problems this year have played them at their own game, pressing them high and hoping against hope to expose their few frailties.

But that would not be the approach of the team which, last season, was the first to inflict a league double on Guardiola. Instead, Conte set up his players almost as if to make a point in his ongoing dispute with Chelsea’s hierarchy regarding the club’s ambition and resources, as though he was laying his side’s limitations bare.

This was a desperate afternoon for Chelsea (Getty)

To sit back, soak up pressure and hope to knick something against this City side is a legitimate approach. It recently worked for Wigan, of course, and Chelsea played in much the same manner for their victory on this ground in December 2016, when the bullish belligerence of one Diego Costa handed them an initiative in the title race that they would not relinquish.

This time, however, there was no Costa to lead the line and both of Conte’s senior, recognised strikers - signed within the last eight months for a combined total of £78m - were named among the substitutes. The absence of N’Golo Kanté, struck down by an illness, was perhaps even more significant. Conte was deprived of a player capable of single-handedly stifling City’s attack.

And so without that disruptive presence in the middle of the park or that focal point to keep City’s defence on the back foot, it became clear that Conte’s plan would not work long before Bernardo Silva scored this game’s single, decisive goal less than a minute into the second half. Even then though, the approach did not change. Those two recognised strikers - Olivier Giroud and Alvaro Morata - eventually arrived off the bench but to no effect. There was no moment of inspiration, no radical change dictated from the touchline, only an air of resignation.

Maybe that is inevitable when everyone expects your manager to resign at the end of the season, as Chelsea managers tend to do every other year. Even if Conte cuts his Stamford Bridge stay short in May as expected, only one of the eight men to come before him during the Roman Abramovich era will have lasted longer. The problem with such a short-term approach is that managers can become dead men walking. They run out of road but find themselves stuck down a cul-de-sac.

After four league defeats in the last five, that seems to be where Conte finds himself now. The deathly sense to Chelsea’s second half at Old Trafford last weekend stretched across the full 90 minutes during this second successive visit to Manchester, leaving their manager to look utterly impotent.

Between the board he is at war with, his under-performing players and the consensus that whatever happens he has three months in the job left, no more and no less, Conte looked strangled by the stasis engulfing Stamford Bridge, powerless to add to the legacy last year’s champions will leave, unable to pull another rabbit out of a hat.