Wonderful but wasteful: Chelsea must unlock the best of Timo Werner | Chelsea

northnaturally the Germans have a word for it. They call it chancentod: literally, “possibility of death”. Be described as a chancentod it doesn’t necessarily make you a bad player. It is not a label that you are stuck with for life. All it means is that, right now, he possesses an unerring, uncanny ability to squander any scoring opportunity that comes his way. Which, despite all his many qualities, seems like a good way to describe Timo Werner at Chelsea right now.

To see Werner lately is to be torn between pity and disbelief. The £ 52 million summer contract has gone nine games without scoring a goal in all competitions. But this is not your usual dry patch. Werner isn’t just not scoring. Dramatically, spectacularly does not score.

There was a one-on-one against West Ham on Monday night. A little credible foul against Leeds when he somehow managed not to score from a yard, without a goalkeeper. Numerous glorious openings were scraped, inflated, gently opened. According to Premier League statistics, Werner has missed eight “big chances” this season.

And yet there are no visible signs of despair or panic. Everyone from Chelsea fans to Frank Lampard to Werner himself seems pleased that this is simply a lean patch, and that the form that earned him 28 Bundesliga goals for RB Leipzig last season, second only to those Robert Lewandowski’s 34, will be back shortly.

This is almost certainly true. Even at his apparent worst, Werner is still a brilliant and horrible forward to play against: fast, smart and aggressive, with a springy turn of pace and a good engine. But in a way, Werner’s drought raises questions that go beyond simple questions of trust and pacing. Rather, analyzing how Werner is gone, Chelsea can learn a thing or two about themselves in the process.

The first thing to keep in mind before the Boxing Day game at Arsenal is that Werner has always been a curiously uneven striker. His first two seasons in Stuttgart brought him seven goals in 62 games. Last year he started with a streak of one goal in eight games and finished with 24 in 25. This season, he waited until October for his first goal in the league, then followed a streak of seven goals in 17 days for the club and the national team. Werner has always scored goals. But it tends to rate them in groups.

This is the pact you enter into when you build your team around Werner: he misses opportunities that others don’t even create. The intelligence of his movement, his speed in transition, the ability to dodge a defender and get to the ball first – this is what ultimately makes him so devastating. But Werner is not a natural finisher in the way that most of us imagine the term.

Look back at some of his attempts with Leipzig in recent seasons and what stands out is the flamboyance of the technique. Werner hits the ball unusually high on his foot, almost at the curve of his ankle. For this reason, he tends to prefer the ball next to him, where he can wrap his leg around the shot, rather than in front of him.

Gently struck, Werner’s shot is a thing of terror: a swift, violent movement that delivers with extreme power what it lacks in finesse and repeatability. But if time is a fraction, it often runs over the ball. He rarely marks with the instep. He rarely scores headshots. He rarely rates curlers. While he misses a disproportionate number of easy opportunities, he also scores a disproportionate number of difficult opportunities. When asked once to describe his shooting style, Werner replied, “Don’t overthink and wait for the ball to go in.”

Now perhaps let’s see why Werner has needed a certain period of adaptation. Leipzig’s counterattack sling style, with its wide movements and quick exchanges, was perfectly suited to his see-ball-hit-ball game, allowing him to find the ball in space and on the run. Cutting the left flank gave him the best chance to tackle the ball sideways.

Chelsea, on the other hand, faces deep defenses more often and moves the ball more slowly than Leipzig in any case. Take advantage of Werner’s two big chances against West Ham, where he received the ball in a static position and thus struggled to get it out from under his feet. “It is more difficult than I thought,” he says of his start in English football.

So how do you get the best out of Werner? Julian Nagelsmann, his last coach, believes it is necessary to start Werner deeper, even at No. 8, to give him momentum when he receives the ball. Lampard initially deployed him as a center forward, then moved him to the left to accommodate Tammy Abraham. Abraham’s five goals and Werner’s four assists suggest it’s working to some degree.

However, the suspicion persists that an even neater solution lies somewhere, that a player of Werner’s personalized gifts demands a personalized approach, something more creative than simply giving him a break and hoping it turns out well.

Perhaps Werner is partially caught up in expectations. Signed in response to Lampard’s request for a proven scorer, his track record suggests that he would fill that role without a hitch. In fact, he’s a much more complex player than that – a genuinely fascinating forward who defies easy categorization. He’s not just a poacher, he’s not a creator, he’s not a striker, but an enigma – one that Lampard, an inexperienced coach still grappling with the riches at his disposal, is still trying to solve.