Managers come and go, but there is an underlining issue at Chelsea that needs to change
Things had been going so well, but Saturday saw the return of our own worst enemy rear its ugly head
Petr Cech, John Terry, Frank Lampard, and Didier Drogba - name me a better spine to a team ever, I’ll wait…
Exactly, you can’t. I am beginning to wonder whether a club would even get close to mirroring that again. I am close to giving up on Chelsea ever having this again. But the bottom line is, we need more leaders, we need a stronger and better mentality.
Things have been brilliant the last 14 matches, there is no denying that. Thomas Tuchel arrived and he injected some real confidence back in to the squad and we have been playing well.
The positivity has been shining through and why not? We had gone from hovering in mid-table in January to being firmly back in the Champions League places, that is some turnaround and plaudits to Tuchel.
New manager bounce? On the whole no, I don’t think so. But giving every player a clean slate would certainly have put a bounce back in the step of a number of the players who had not been playing to say the least.
However, West Brom on Saturday bought our own worst enemy back out again and introduced Tuchel to the real Chelsea that we have unfortunately gotten used to over recent seasons - A spineless and gutless group when things are not going our way.
It’s happened far too many times over the years I have lost count. But once something does not go our way, instead of picking ourselves back up and motivating each other to come back, our heads drop and we become our very own worst enemies on the pitch.
We can have the greatest mentalities in the world when things are going our way and we are winning matches, we have seen that and seen the togetherness whilst we have been getting results.
But as soon as Thiago Silva got sent off on Saturday and we had been misplacing passes all through the first ten minutes, you could just see on their faces and in their body language that this was game over, even though we had a 1-0 lead.
If we had the aforementioned leadership spine of the team, we would have sat on that 1-0 win and fought for all three points.
But Chelsea lack motivating leaders. They have plenty of big gobs who can shout and scream all game, but leadership is about so much more than shouting at the players, and unfortunately we do not have that in this squad when things are pulling against us.
Nobody stands up, everyone hides and disappears.
Now you can change a manager as much as you want to, but unfortunately the players stay the same. Read my next piece about how it is time to finally move some of the players on here.
Written by Simon Phillips (@siphillipssport)