Chelsea draw a blank against West Ham as winning streak comes to an end

West Ham 0-0 Chelsea: Maurizio Sarri's side were looking to join Liverpool at the top of the Premier League, but they were denied by a resilient and enterprising display from their hosts

Chelsea’s winning run finally ends, while West Ham United’s poor run seems definitively over. As to why that was, and why this derby ended 0-0, that’s as difficult to figure out as this game was to watch.

West Ham do seem to have found a creditable resilience that had been so conspicuously missing in those porous early defeats, but was that here only because a flat Chelsea at last levelled out? Unlike similar performances in the first five games, this time they couldn't find that moment of individual inspiration to clinch a close game.

This really didn’t look like the London derby this usually is, but instead a match between two teams under new managers still finding out what’s what. This is exactly why Maurizio Sarri has been stating Chelsea are not title contenders.

It says much that the moments that mostly defined the game were air-swipes and bad misses, the latter most notably coming from Andriy Yarmolenko and – right at the end – Willian, who blazed well wide from just a few yards out.

That was the slight incongruity to this match. So little happened, and yet there were a fair few high-quality chances.

Perhaps some of the low intensity was down to the way Chelsea are using the ball. We are seeing a lot of the Sarri possession - Jorginho hitting a Premier League record of 180 passes in one game - but not so much of the Sarri pressing and proactivity. Not enough of those 180 passes were the kind of penetrating forward balls both Jorginho and his manager idealise. There were long spells when Chelsea were kind of dabbing at the edge of the West Ham box with the ball, but not often getting in behind.

It was all the more frustrating that there looked real danger when they did. Olivier Giroud couldn’t convert one early chance and an unusually quiet Eden Hazard seemed to have broken only to just take a little too much out of the ball before getting off a shot. Coming in the 12th minute, it was Chelsea’s last shot on target for almost an hour, when substitute Alvaro Morata hit the ball at Lukasz Fabianski’s face.

Alvaro Morata’s shot from close range was saved (Getty)

Hazard did play a sublime cross just before half-time; Willian diverted back for a diving N’Golo Kante to head just wide. It was the second time that the midfielder had been in that position, and probably illustrates how Chelsea still haven’t hit Sarri’s usual levels of attacking co-ordination that the five-foot-five Kante was the player getting on the end of crosses.

That was far from the best chance of the game, though. That fell to Yarmolenko on 77 minutes, who somehow headed wide when a fine Robert Snodgrass cross left him with the goal at his mercy. He then held that head in his hands, scarcely able to believe it, much like the rest of the stadium.

Chelsea’s approach was leaving them open to West Ham’s pace. Both Michael Antonio and Yarmolenko scorched towards Kepa Arrizabalaga’s goal in the first half, but both chances fell to Antonio, whose finishing couldn’t match his pace. He blazed one shot wide, and then the other at Kepa, who did stand his ground well.

Chelsea did seem to adjust to this, as Antonio Rudiger then outpaced Antonio to cut out one moment of danger in the second half.

The match had by then lost a lot of intensity, though, and this is the story of Chelsea’s season so far. It is why the points return hasn’t felt like it fully matched the performance level, a 100 per cent record not reflecting the fact they are still really only 60-70 per cent a Sarri team.

West Ham meanwhile looked much more like Manuel Pellegrini’s team, but also felt a far cry from how calamitously open they were earlier in the season. They had closed up, with Declan Rice especially impressive in blocking so much through the middle.

It means West Ham move that bit closer to the middle of the table, but Chelsea-Liverpool next Saturday is no longer quite the block-bluster battle of winning streaks at the top that it had been built up to.

That’s because Chelsea still look like what they were throughout all that: a work in progress.