Thomas Tuchel and Andreas Christensen make some important points on the Manchester City defeat
Tuchel and Christensen provided some further words on Monday in response to Saturday's loss
We simply cannot win them all, right?
It’s the harsh reality of football. But I think what made it worse being beaten by Manchester City on Saturday was not losing to them in general, they are a world class team with world class players and a world class manager, it was more the manner of the defeat and how easily we were beaten and penned in.
City wanted it much more, and they ended up making us look very average, which we know we are not.
Thomas Tuchel provided some more words on the defeat on Monday and he sums it up perfectly here.
“We don't care against who we play, we do our thing and we need to be better,’ Tuchel explains. It's about making opponents underperform. City did this to us, they had high ball wins,” Tuchel told the Chelsea website.
City made us underperform, that is exactly it in a nutshell. They wanted it more, and there was no way they were going to come away having lost their fourth game in a row to us. That wasn’t even an option for them, and that’s how the game played out.
“We talked about the high pressing but with our decision-making I never felt fully confident we would escape the pressure with short passes,” Tuchel continued.
“I never felt fully confident when we decided to go for long balls.
“We have Romelu upfront who we can put long balls into, but without that genuine belief and confidence, and also without the moments where you really hurt your opponent, it gets more and more difficult, and this is how the game went on Saturday.
”When we escaped the pressure, which was hard enough, we took bad decisions in playing into our strikers. When we played it into our strikers, they took bad decisions in the first contact and lost the ball.
“So you lose more and more belief and it was simply not a good enough performance to deserve more.”
“If you play at this level, we always look at performance, we never look at results. We want to have the results as a consequence of our performances. In the very toughest games you need to be at the very best level in all parts of the game, and we were clearly not.”
Upon reflection, this is literally exactly it. Tuchel just knows it was one of those days where the opponents were up for it, and his players were not. He will also know this cannot happen again anytime soon. Losing in this manner is never easy to swallow.
Defender Andreas Christensen defended his heart out again and was one of the few positives. He has been absolutely colossal since Tuchel arrived at the club in January and what a turnaround it has been for him.
He has also made some very valid points on the game, speaking to the Chelsea website on Monday afternoon.
“It’s the perfect game to respond, absolutely,” said Christensen on Juventus this Wednesday.
“It’s not nice to lose our first match, but now we have another game coming up very quickly and it’s another tough game as well.
“It will be a tough game but it’s a great opportunity to get back to playing football the way we want to play, the way we see ourselves, playing on the front foot again. It’s a tough game but there’s no better way to recover from a defeat than to beat another good team.
“I don’t think we see ourselves as a defensive team. We’ve shown in other games we can play with a back five or a back three with quality. We want to be on the front foot.
“I think you always feel like that when you play at home. It was a tough match to get into and it was only after their goal that we came alive, but by then it was too late really.
“We came into the game quite strongly, but they were better on the day. It was always going to be a tough game. We feel like we gave the first half away a little bit and we got into the game too late. It felt like we lacked a bit of everything, especially in the first half.
“As soon as we got on the ball in the first half, we had no options really. We lacked a bit of intensity, energy going forward, a bit of composure on the ball. We lacked what we usually have on the ball, so it was a bit of everything and it’s disappointing but we’re looking forward.”
Chelsea certainly looked defensive on Saturday mind, that is the most defensive and deepest I have seen us play, and Tuchel was screaming at his players to play higher in the first half but it didn’t happen.
As Christensen says, City were just way more intense, and Chelsea must now need to brush themselves off and not let that happen again.
Simon Phillips