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Liverpool legend turned pundit Jamie Carragher has not been afraid to share his opinions since retiring. In response to Chelsea's Champions League exit at the hands of PSG, he voiced his concern with the state of Premier League football in a typically bold manner. While his overall point at the very least creates an interesting discussion, some of the specifics of his argument were questionable.
"I only felt there was one English team with a chance of winning the Champions League before the start of the season and that was Chelsea," said Carragher, as reported in the Guardian. "You saw how far they looked off PSG. I know they never lost either game but both games PSG were far superior and they are not what you would call one of the absolute elite."
"So for Chelsea, our best team in the league, to go out to a PSG side that what you would call before the tie not one of the top sides is disappointing. As a whole, the rest of the league, we are falling short in things that we used to do to the other teams."
It's rather strange that Carragher uses Chelsea as evidence of a decline in Premier League play, especially because the second leg of their match up with PSG went down to the wire. Furthermore, his assertion that PSG is not an elite club is highly debatable.
Carragher pulled from his own experiences to portray the negative changes that he sees in the Premier League game.
"At Liverpool we had great technical players at the time, but we were more powerful than the other teams," he said. "We had the physical intensity of the Premier League, we took that into the Champions League. Now you look at it and PSG looked more powerful than Chelsea over the two games which is probably a bigger worry than the football."
This seems like a case of a player just past his playing days reminiscing about the good 'ol days, but there is an argument to be made that certain Premier League powers such as Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool have endured a bit of a rough stretch in Europe over the past few seasons, indicating the onset of a worrisome trend. Or these declines are just temporary and ultimately meaningless ebbs that happen every so often in all of Europe's top leagues.
