I'm not sure it was all built around Fabregas. We lost Rosicky to injury and Hleb to ice-cream, and I thought they were an important part of what we were trying to do. Flamini also became an important complement. After all of those key elements had been lost, we changed Fabregas' position, moving him further up the field to give him more offensive responsibility. I don't think we had a static plan built around Fabregas. I feel like his importance increased as the quality of the players around him increased and over time it looked more and more like the team was built around him.
If we had managed to maintain that exciting group that included Adebayor, Fabregas, Hleb, Rosicky, Flamini, I think it would have been easy to slot players in and out, eg replacing Fabregas with Wilshere or even Nasri, and still maintain some quality. The problem is that we just watched talent whither around the boy.
