Premier League Hangover: Groundhog Day as Chelsea Close on Record

In the admittedly unlikely event of each Premier League club being assigned a Christmas movie that best represents them, there would be few dissenting voices if Arsenal were paired with Groundhog Day.

Director Harold Ramis' 1993 classic about misanthropic Pittsburgh TV weatherman Phil Connors sees Bill Murray's character trapped in a time loop, repeating the same day over and over.

As a cultural reference point to help convey a football club's psyche, it's often been prescribed as a comparison with Arsenal, usually after a lily-livered performance that derails a period of promise.

I've done it myself; it's an easy fit. Except it doesn't really work.

Groundhog Day isn't really about repetition; it's ultimately about change. It's about learning from reoccurring history rather than repeating it ad nauseam.

If Arsene Wenger were cast in the film, he'd still be waking up to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" each morning, Arsenal would finish each season between second and fourth—but never first—until the end of time (which to be fair, they probably will), and there would be more chance of him getting together with the groundhog than Andie MacDowell's character, Rita Hanson, at its conclusion.

Chelsea boss Antonio Conte doesn't seem like a man prone to make the same mistake twice. It has certainly taken him significantly less time to work out how to get what he wants than Connors. 

Yet, just like in the film, it's as though Chelsea are repeating the same day on a loop—it's matchday and they win without conceding a goal. Boxing Day's 3-0 win over Bournemouth was a club record 12th Premier League win in a row, with 10 clean sheets having been kept over the same period.

Conte might lack Murray's sardonic hangdog expression, but few are complaining at Stamford Bridge. He's no less entertaining. 

There's a certain irony then to Wenger and his Arsenal side providing the Italian's Road to Damascus moment.

Late September's 3-0 defeat to Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium—on the back of a home loss to Liverpool—led to Conte ditching Chelsea's tried-and-tested back four in favour of a 3-4-3 formation. Given he's played three at the back throughout the majority of his career it's not exactly Sir Isaac Newton arriving at the theory of gravity having watched an apple fall from a tree, but impressive nonetheless.

In hindsight, Wenger would probably have preferred a victory of the less-emphatic variety. It would not be a surprise were it to prove the defining match of the season.

Monday's victory over a Bournemouth side as talented as it is spirited wasn't quite a procession, but had Conte left the field to the now-familiar serenade of "Antonio, Antonio" on horseback, it would have been a fitting finale to 2016 for Chelsea and their manager. 

A year of vertiginous peaks and nose-to-the-floor troughs creaks to its conclusion with Chelsea seven points clear at the Premier League summit (which could drop to six if Liverpool beat Stoke City on Tuesday). Chelsea have previously been top of the Premier League at Christmas on four occasions. In each campaign they won the title.

After last year's Boxing Day draw with Watford, the Blues were a staggering 27 points worse off than they are now. Just three points separated Chelsea from the relegation zone, with a mutinous home crowd having identified Eden Hazard, Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas as being ringleading conscientious objectors in refusing to go to war for departed manager Jose Mourinho.

There are not so many homemade placards at Stamford Bridge games these days.

Chelsea are now two wins short of Arsenal's Premier League record of 14 consecutive victories, which overlapped the end of the 2001-02 campaign with the start of 2002-03. Their next game is at home to Stoke City on New Year's Eve, before playing Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane on January 4.

If Record Breakers' Roy Castle is watching, he'll be polishing his trumpet in the sky.

Pedro's opening goal against Bournemouth was so cocksure, so swaggering, so certain in its architecture and execution, it's a wonder it didn't request total silence from the crowd in order to fully appreciate its beauty prior to nestling in Artur Boruc's top corner. 

An ordinary footballer would have played the simple ball wide when receiving possession with a Bournemouth player touch tight; Hazard is anything other than an ordinary footballer.

Instead he turned infield, a rabbit that saw a meadow to one side and a busy road to the other and chose the road, before laying it into Fabregas on the edge of the box. Nine Bournemouth players were behind the ball. There's not a finer short passer in the Premier League than the Spaniard, few in the game can find an angle better. If he ever had to take a random drugs test, he'd probably be found positive for having injected ground-up protractor.

He found his compatriot for a 98th Premier League assist (only Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Ryan Giggs have more) and Pedro did the rest. With the concentration of a kid trying to scoop up the last remnants in an ice-cream tub, he got his foot under the ball and propelled it past Boruc.

The identity of the goalscorer somehow seemed fitting after Pedro had given an illuminating interview in the buildup to the game extolling the methods of Conte.

As the Telegraph's Matt Law points out, Pedro could not have been more explicit in his belief that "trust" is the key to Conte's revolution at Chelsea had he conducted the interview with the word daubed on his cheek, in the style of Prince's "slave" protest after numerous run-ins with his record label, Warner Bros.

Having won the World Cup, the European Championship, five La Liga titles and three UEFA Champions Leagues it stands to reason Pedro's trust probably has to be earned.

A representative sample snapshot read:

"

He (Conte) put trust and belief in all of the players and then we started winning matches. Quite easily, he just turned things around. He put the trust, the belief in all of us that we could win matches, that we could win the League.

We started to go really well, our trust started growing and everything became really positive. We've got a lot of trust and that really helps.

"

It was Ernest Hemingway who said: "The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them."

To a man Chelsea's players look as though they have heeded the American writer's advice. It's impossible to oversee a complete transformation of a side in the period Conte has without a complete buy-in from your players. Every facet of that team—individually and collectively—is presently working in absolute unison.

There's almost a peaceful violence to the way they flood forward on the counter-attack. It's bowling-ball-level destructive, but so often their goals are exquisitely engineered to the point that it's hard imagine the pins making a sound when they drop.

Chelsea were relentless all afternoon against Bournemouth. 

At his current level, Hazard arguably eclipses his form in the season before last when he was deservedly named PFA Player of the Year. Here, as a false nine, he mercilessly made Bournemouth's defenders look like false footballers. His 50th Premier League goal for Chelsea in converting a penalty he had won for taking Bournemouth defender Simon Francis to Chinatown and back again, was just deserts for one of the most viscerally thrilling individual performances seen this season.

Only three Chelsea players have got to a half century of league goals quicker than Hazard's 155 games. That's quite the stat considering he took the whole of last season off to go backpacking on Mourinho's credit card. 

Willian played as though in possession of a third lung, Pedro's movement would have evaded Russian Aerospace Forces, while Hazard conducted with the imperiousness of Leonard Bernstein.

A word, too, for Thibaut Courtois. Given Chelsea's dominance of matches in recent weeks, the goalkeeeper has taken to dipping into a book when the ball is stationed in the opposition's half for any lengthy period, yet never once did his concentration dip. Real Madrid's advances, per Radio Onda Cero (h/t The Sun), need to be repelled until the summer at the very least. 

The significance of Pedro's contribution was two-fold in that he was one of two enforced changes Conte was forced to make. Suspensions for hugely influential duo Costa and N'Golo Kante were supposed to be some of the first tests this season posed to a Chelsea squad that Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp labelled the luckiest with injuries in the league, in a recent interview with Sky Sports.

Klopp said:

"

I am pretty sure that until now Chelsea are maybe the team that have had the most luck with injuries. We lost Phil [Coutinho] and Daniel [Sturridge] and Danny Ings in difficult moments when you really could use them.

If it's Hazard and Costa at Chelsea, is it the same afterwards? It's a long season and they have to play us again—and not only us, they have to play Arsenal again and all of the others.

"

Chelsea's response to having the most in-form striker in the Premier League—and possibly its most important player over the past 18 months—sidelined could barely have been more emphatic. It's hardly like being asked to patch up the Great Wall of China using a child's toolbox when you can call on two World Cup winners in Pedro and Fabregas, but then Conte never said it was.

That said, a record of just one win in the previous 11 games they have played without Costa does add a touch of credence to Klopp's questioning of how they might cope in his absence over a more prolonged period.

Conte's decision to deny £33 million buy Michy Batshuayi a much-anticipated first Premier League start of the season has not curried universal favour among Chelsea supporters, even withstanding the manner of the win. The dynamic seems similar to Mourinho and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, so expect the big Belgian to be scoring scorpion kicks early next year.

"I think a lot of people had been waiting for this game where we played without two important players," Conte said, somewhat pointedly perhaps, post-match, per the Guardian.

"They hope it would be a moment when we could lose points. It didn't happen and I am pleased. I hope to continue to win until the end of this season."

They may well do just that. It's all getting very Groundhog Day, isn't it?