Alvaro Morata is Chelsea's subtle knife but sometimes they need blunt instrument Diego Costa

Sign up to Miguel Delaney’s Reading the Game newsletter sent straight to your inbox for free

Sign up to Miguel’s Delaney’s free weekly newsletter

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

After a first goalless game of the season, and one big miss from his main goalscorer, Antonio Conte was predictably asked about Alvaro Morata’s performance following the 0-0 with Arsenal. The manager was ever so slightly defensive.

“I don’t know. In my opinion, Morata played a really good game. I’m very happy with his performance. He had a lot of the ball and tried to send Willian, Pedro, our wing-backs… he played a really good game.

“We are focused on whether the No 9 scores or not. If he scored, he played a good game. If he doesn’t, he didn’t have a good game - but I was happy with his performance. We see other things.”

Conte is right and Morata can do many things that give the champions something different and elevate them in other ways - but it’s still difficult to get away from the main reason why players like him are on the pitch: to score.

Chelsea hitting a blank for the first time this season raised the argument as to what they miss most from Diego Costa.

While Morata is supreme when the ball is played into him, most of his goals are reactive and come from systematic team play - hence so many are ghosted or glanced headers. He needs the service.

That is not quite the case with Costa. He has a remarkable ability to produce a goal from nothing, to suddenly settle everything in a game. If Morata’s signature goal is a header, for example, it almost feels like Costa’s is abrasively winning the ball near the side of the pitch and then cutting inside to finish from an angle. It seemed to happen so often.

A classic was last season’s solitary strike in the 1-0 win over West Brom at Stamford Bridge, the kind of goal and game that went a long way to winning the title for Chelsea. It is not an exaggeration to liken the capacity for that to Eric Cantona, especially given the frequency that Costa did it with last season.

If there is no way back for the Spanish international, that is going to be something that Chelsea will lack, and it is especially notable when Eden Hazard is not playing.

That is the occasional negative of system-based attacking football, that it can lead to just playing to a template on bad afternoons, even if its many positives will outweigh that. It is also why it makes such a difference to have a player who can break out of that.

Morata isn’t quite that but one other positive for Chelsea is that Conte is probably the best manager in the Premier League in terms of making a breakthrough with his tactics, who can adapt to what he has.

It might be that he alters the champions’ attack for those times Morata isn’t firing, although he has still made a hugely promising start so far. His confidence seems to have only grown, and it looks like Premier League defenders are going to have real difficulty tracking those runs, as he has that clear ability to just evade them for those headers.

It is something that might require something a little different in Chelsea’s approach, though, since they are no longer using Costa’s capacity for something so different in general play.