Chelsea won an important game on Monday night – but there are certainly things to improve.
“To concede goals in this way… is tough,” Mauricio Pochettino pointed out in his post match interview with Chelsea TV after his team twice let Newcastle back into the game at home.
He’s not wrong, and when that second Magpies goal hit the net we felt the familiar panic spreading.
But as we’ve said all year – you don’t have to worry about perfect defending if you consistently get the ball in the net, and our 3 scored gave us enough of a cushion.
You can see the coach reacting in the clip embedded here:
Far more than our defending Newcastle, like opponents before them, continued to illustrate how vulnerable we are to a committed press. We struggled mightily to play out in the first half and it led to multiple close calls when we lost possession in bad areas. The main culprit appears to be that, despite his qualities as a shot-stopper, Petrovic struggles to deliver a pin-point pass over 30 yds. By now the whole league has figured this out and they’re stacking 3, 4, and 5 men right outside the penalty area and are confronting us the moment we touch the ball into play. If we can’t manage improvement immediately it’s almost inevitable that we’ll have to star heaving the ball long or resign ourselves to any number of bad goals conceded.