LONDON -- The Raheem Sterling renaissance is well underway. After impressive displays in Chelsea's first two games of the season, here was the missing piece, the charming third time where Sterling delivered goals to go with the creative mantle he had taken on against Liverpool and West Ham. This Chelsea billion-dollar hodgepodge of talent needed a veteran to set the tone. In the England international, for so long an extremely complementary piece at Manchester City, that is what they have.
When Chelsea needed a player to deliver it was Sterling who was on hand. His brilliant solo strike early on was the first time in seven matches that the Blues had scored the opening goal. Such have been their travails of late that neither the crowd nor Mauricio Pochettino's squad seemed all that at ease with a one goal advantage against newly-promoted opposition, but just as the tension began to ratchet up, Sterling was on hand to ease it, turning in Malo Gusto's low cross with a trademark finish.
What has stood out most of all from Sterling's early form, though, are his creative qualities, on full display as he fizzed a delicious low cross onto the boot of Nicolas Jackson, the summer signing needing only to stick a boot on the ball to net his first for Chelsea. There could have been more, plenty more, and few of his team mates showed the razor sharp edge that the England international largely provided in the final third. The shots came with greater frequency than usual, but the sloppiness in front of goal that has plagued Chelsea in 2023 was as apparent as ever. Few seemed that concerned tonight. No wonder. For the first time since March 11, Stamford Bridge saw the home team win.
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The caveat "only against Luton" is going to be applied a lot this season. The harsh reality of their opening two games is that this does not appear to be a team that is ready to face the best the Premier League has to offer. The good news is there are plenty of inferior opponents to Brighton and Chelsea from whom Rob Edwards' side can hope to get points. They will not face many tests more fierce than Sterling in this sort of form.
The best the visitors could say of their performance were that there were passages of play where they were able to play on Stamford Bridge's hang ups, a ground that hadn't seen a home league win since March seizing up en masse. Ryan Giles' deflected shot off Malo Gusto, forcing Robert Sanchez to swing a fist at the ball, was the high point in a flurry of pressure around the hour mark, but Chelsea's neuroses still seemed the best weapon in Luton's attacking arsenal. Before too long Sterling quelled them.
Sterling's first two games of the season might have brought creativity and interplay in abundance, but that did not translate into shots. A player who routinely averaged two and a half per 90 minutes, sometimes hitting three, in a City shirt had taken just one in his first two games. That that followed in the trajectory of his first season at Stamford Bridge made you wonder if Pochettino had concluded he was simply not going to get the same output from his No.7 that Pep Guardiola once had.
This match may yet begin to disprove that case. Through seven minutes Sterling had trebled his seasonal shot tally, his first instinct evidently to test Thomas Kaminski in front of the Shed End. When the ball sat up nicely in the penalty area he had no qualms in absolutely walloping it towards goal. His captain Ben Chilwell could have applied those lessons in the second half when, bearing down on the Luton goal, he attempted to squeeze a pass through Amari'i Bell's legs and into Sterling's path as tens of thousands screamed for him to hit it.
One could understand why Chilwell was prepared to demur to the hot hand after Chelsea's brilliant opener. Picking the ball up on the right touchline, Sterling drove into a gap between two defenders that should never pop up on the edge of the box. Two more were turned to stone as he dropped the hesitation move that has, for good and ill, become something of a trademark. When the shot came it was judged to perfection, rolling purposefully into Kaminski's far post.
Chelsea's response to the ascendancy was curious and Pochettino would do well to focus on the rather passive approach to the remainder of the first half, where the hosts showed precious little incision to break down Luton's ever deepening defensive block. In the 34 minutes between Sterling's opener and a flurry of second half openings, Chelsea registered just one shot. They created an altogether more nervy experience for themselves than might have been needed.
Crucially, however, Sterling upping his shot output tonight did not come at the cost of any creativity and in the second half he was laying on chances for his team mates that he would have been on the end of in the first half. A precisely placed cross to the back post begged Enzo Fernandez to turn in from a tight angle. What he couldn't do, Jackson did. The center forward got his reward for a string of dangerous runs across the face of Tom Lockyer.
In the weeks to come, Jackson will surely not get as many of those prime opportunities as he did tonight. Almost everything associated with this win needs to be taken with at least a pinch of salt when it is done against the sort of opposition Chelsea usually only run into in the EFL Cup. Chelsea have not solved their profligacy problem as a whole, at least not yet, but if Sterling is on the way to addressing his, then good things may be around the corner for Pochettino.
