Here we are again folks, another Chelsea manager talking about a lack of mentality from his players, our achilles heal is back.
Pretty much every single manager from Jose Mourinho’s second spell at the club until now has mentioned something or other about Chelsea players mentalities, or lack of, and interestingly enough a few of the same players have always been there from that period until now.
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But I have no idea why this problem keeps occurring, because largely we have been at it under Thomas Tuchel, mentalities and desire to win was the last thing we could have questioned. But if you remember Frank Lampard picked up on it as well, and now Tuchel has.
The blues boss has been talking about a drop in levels and concentration on the Chelsea website after our 3-3 draw with Zenit last night.
To be honest it was clear as day to see, once the first equaliser went in our heads dropped and many gave up, and I have seen that countless times before with this lot. Something I thought had finally changed with this group, but apparently not.
“We had a very good first 15 minutes and then we stopped doing the things we did in the first 15 minutes,” the boss said of the performance against Zenit.
“The feeling was we could smile, the feeling was that this is okay what we are doing as we are in charge and we are the better team. But we were forgetting why we were the better team, which was because the level of concentration and the level of physical investment was high enough to be the better team.
“Once this drops even 10 per cent, once we start managing results and change our behaviour because of what the score is, we get punished. That happened to us at West Ham and it happened to us today.
“We start playing balls back, we start not attacking with the same aggression, the same hunger as before, and we got punished now twice.
“Otherwise you allow the possibility to get punished when you’re unlucky enough, like obviously we are at the moment. The challenge is to close the door to minimise the possibility and it’s very easy – you have a higher level of sprints, a higher level of intensity, a higher concentration level. The basics need to be pushed to a higher level.
“The quality [in the Champions League] is high, the technical level is incredibly high, so you need to do your stuff on the highest level. If you do it, you can have a game like in the first 15 minutes here. If you don’t do it and the feeling is this should be okay you get punished because the level is too high, and this is what happened.”
