Conor Gallagher was one of the players chosen to step up to the first team last night against Real Madrid, and the midfielder put in a shift like usual, this time in very difficult circumstances.
He played as part of an interesting narrow 4 man midfield employed by Lampard to try and press Madrid into a mistake, and it very nearly worked, with the Blues missing two big chances to take the lead.
Gallagher himself was a key part of that, and he and N’Golo Kante spent as much time chasing down Madrid defenders as they did on the ball themselves.
His quotes on the Chelsea official website show a man who is frustrated by the result but ultimately proud of his team’s efforts.
“I think we definitely had more and better chances than they did but football is all about taking your chances and we didn’t do that, which was disappointing. Of course, we’re going to be gutted, but we played some good stuff I think.
“The cutting edge in front of goal is basically what wins you games and we haven’t got that at the minute. It’s definitely a big improvement over our recent performances but you need to score goals to win games. They did that and we didn’t.
“We pushed players forward and they were able to catch us on the counter a couple of times, which was the risk. Everybody will be very disappointed but I think there was a lot of improvement in our football over recent performances and I hope the fans can take that away.”
Once again it was the lack of cutting edge that cost us – if Kante had put that early chance away and the stadium had gone crazy, we’d have had a very different game on our hands.
But the cost of having pressing machines like Gallagher in the side is that you perhaps sacrifice some quality finishing.
