Liverpool’s Andy Robertson with Chelsea’s Mason Mount.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/sports/soccer/chelsea-liverpool-lukaku.html
It is this, as much as the threat of Lukaku, that makes Chelsea such a threat: the air of invulnerability, of redoubtable stolidity, that Tuchel has bestowed on his team in his eight months as coach. Chelsea has the firepower to see off the majority of the Premier League’s teams. But just as important is that it has the battery to keep out the great and the good.

It is easy, in the frenzy of the summer, as new players arrive to garland old teams, to believe that what matters is who can call upon the most talent, that titles are handed out to the sides with the most dazzling squad lists and the greatest expenditures.

But that is not quite how it works. There is another stage to the process: those resources have to be fashioned into a functioning unit, all of those gifted individuals crafted into a team. Lukaku may yet prove the final piece in the puzzle for Chelsea. What matters more, though, is that Tuchel had already put the rest of it together.