​Aston Villa v Arsenal, August 2024. Morgan Rogers receives a pass facing his own goal and Declan Rice is immediately on his back. The Villa midfielder takes the ball with the outside of his right foot and swivels into space, leaving Rice behind. The space is quickly filled by Arsenal’s midfield enforcer Thomas Partey, but Rogers knocks it past Partey and races around his back to regather the ball, leaving the Ghanaian splayed on the grass. Their tussle at least buys Rice time to catch up, but as he lunges in to make the tackle, Rogers takes a clever touch and Rice concedes a clumsy foul.Arsenal would go on to win but it was an afternoon full of moments like that one in which Rogers tormented his opponents. After the game, Mikel Arteta marvelled at his performance. On Sky Sports, Jamie Redknapp compared Rogers to “Jonah Lomu in his prime”, and when you saw the trail of Arsenal bodies left on the floor, you understood exactly what he meant.The Lomu comparison touched on what makes Rogers rare, even unique, in world football, and perhaps helps to explain why Chelsea were prepared to spend £117m to sign him this summer. Rogers is a blend of football genres, a walking oxymoron, powerful and graceful, hardy and agile, heavy and light all at once, like some contorted beast with the shoulders of a buffalo and the feet of a squirrel on an errand.Morgan Rogers has made an impressive start to life at Chelsea (Getty)There are other robust ball-carriers at the top of the game: Antoine Semenyo and Jude Bellingham come to mind; Ryan Gravenberch, Manu Kone and Rice all perform similar functions from deep. But none have Rogers’ package of strength and balance, quick feet and rapid acceleration, that creative eye and subtle movement between the lines. In an increasingly homogenized world of coaching and industrialised talent production, Rogers is something of a unicorn forward.One of the quandaries with Rogers and his complete profile is exactly how best to use him. Is he a pacey winger or a central creator? Does he thrive in space or make space himself? The manager who gave him his league debut at Lincoln City, Michael Appleton, quickly recognised Rogers’ appetite for physical confrontation and played on that trait.“He actually likes the contact,” Appleton told Sky Sports. “He enjoys people being really tight to him and he can then use his physical frame to roll them on the inside or the outside. Because I knew Morgan liked contact, I knew I could play him inside as a 10. It is one thing being nippy with a slight frame and going past people, but when you are 6ft 2in and you can do that…”Rogers told the Guardian that he likes to be in the centre of the pitch surrounded by defenders. “The way I play and where I want to play on the pitch, there is going to be contact and traffic around me, so to be able to feel pressure and turn away from it is something I pride myself on.”What is clear from the opening weeks of the season is just how well R