"I came here for a year, but it ended up being four years. ”
Thiago Silva has announced through his official website that he will leave Chelsea at the end of the season. The media expects him to return to Brazil to join his parent club Fluminense. Interestingly, despite his four-year stint at Chelsea, if the rumours of his move to Fluminense are true, he will only be the third oldest player in the squad, behind goalkeeper Fabio and midfielder Felipe Melo.
It's hard to sum up his years with the Blues in a few words. As he said in the interview, the combination of the pandemic, and the most turbulent period in the team's 20-year years due to the ripple effects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, has blurred the timeline of those years. The previous year, he and Thomas Tuchel hated the Champions League final at PSG, and a year later, the master and apprentice duo wore blue shirts to lift the Big Ears trophy, which was undoubtedly a good story. But when you think back to the scene of winning the cup, you have a real feeling of "three years have passed"?
Looking back on Thiago Silva's years at Chelsea, it is not so much that his highlights are fresh in his memory, but rather that he has consistently given the impression of 'steady', which itself is the result of the accumulation of 'no mistakes' in many games. The older generation of centre-backs used to say that if you were going to make a tackle, you were already losing. Thiago Silva is not known for his one-man imagery, perhaps because he rarely exposes himself to one-on-one situations. He has rarely been feared in frontal defense, and he has already entered the sophistication of not having to rely on camera grabbing to make a name for himself.
Heroes are always in the twilight, and in the latter stages of his time with the Blues, he has indeed become more and more involved in tactics and personnel arrangements to "protect" him in order to play to his strengths and avoid weaknesses. But until the middle of this season, his experience and command skills with his young team-mates were well worth compromising elsewhere in the squad to let him go. We don't know how much of an impact he has on juniors as a big brother in the dressing room, but just because he is still a model of dedication and dedication until he leaves the team, it is no longer a legacy that every veteran can see.
It has been said before that the peak of Thiago Silva's peak has been spent in Ligue 1, which has been relatively little watched, and the level of winning the title of "best central defender in the world" is therefore not easily visible to the world. To Chelsea's surprise, even if he has fallen back slightly due to age, Thiago Silva's early performance can still be called world-class, which can be regarded as making up for a small regret of selfishness.
Not everyone can make a good impression on every team that has been there for a long time, but Thiago Silva has done it. Excluding the Porto B team, which was just a passerby, and Dynamo Moscow, who contracted tuberculosis during his time and almost retired, Thiago Silva's reputation at AC Milan, Grand Paris and Chelsea was almost unanimous, and he must've done something right.