Mauricio Pochettino should have stopped his Chelsea players doing one thing in the League Cup final against Liverpool on Sunday and perhaps if he did, they would have come away with a trophy.
Winning a trophy would have been absolutely huge for Pochettino and his young group of players in their first season together. They should have won this game, especially when it got to extra time and they were fully on top. It would have been a real triumph for the club, the manager, the players, and the fans collectively and you got the sense that they badly needed some silverware during what has been a very tense and turmoil couple of seasons under the new ownership group.
EXCLUSIVE! Chelsea eyeing new goalkeeper with Premier League stopper coming to the forefront!
But it wasn’t to be, and journalist Ben Jacobs believes that playing for penalties in extra time was a big mistake and Pochettino should have instructed his players not to do that.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE!
– Massive missed opportunity
– Playing for penalties was very surprising
– Cultural or psychological problems?
– Next 4 games key for Pochettino
– Mentality still an issue
– More.. @JacobsBen Chelsea column here:https://t.co/VVWaPc3GdD pic.twitter.com/p3foZ2S3eB— Simon Phillips (@siphillipssport) February 26, 2024
In his exclusive and extensive Chelsea column for SPTC today, Jacobs said: “If Pochettino felt his players were playing for penalties he arguably should have stopped them. If he didn’t realise until after the game then what was said (or should have been said) at the end of 90 minutes to keep momentum going from the last 15 minutes of the game.”
No amount of pundit blather is going to change the simple fact that our guys were clearly exhausted in ET. So to say Poch “should have stopped them” from playing for penalties is like saying he should have squeezed blood from a stone. Particularly by the second half of ET, there just wasn’t a lot of fuel left in the tank and no amount of Monday morning second guessing changes what anyone with eyes could see on Sunday. Take your frustration and put it elsewhere. We were done in by the experience of Virgil Van Dijk and the inexperience of his markers, not, as the pundits would try and have you believe, any decisions made by Mauricio Pochettino.