Chelsea head coach Thomas Tuchel has said his team did not adapt well enough to going down to 10 men in the Premier League encounter with West Bromwich Albion. It was the manager’s first loss since taking over at Chelsea and he said the result was a reality check for both him and his team.
Thomas Tuchel said “After the red card we were not able to cope with the situation. Hopefully it’s a big-wake up call for all of us, me included. We will get the right response because this is sport and this is absolutely necessary. First of all, it’s important we digest it, because it’s a lot to digest. I did not see it coming. Now we have to take our responsibilities – me included – and shake it off and continue tomorrow.”
Thomas Tuchel said “After the red card we were not able to cope with the situation. Hopefully it’s a big-wake up call for all of us, me included. We will get the right response because this is sport and this is absolutely necessary. First of all, it’s important we digest it, because it’s a lot to digest. I did not see it coming. Now we have to take our responsibilities – me included – and shake it off and continue tomorrow.”The boss also wasn’t happy with the errors made by his team.
Thomas Tuchel said “We were rusty, we were sloppy in the build-up in our own half, we did many, many unforced errors, we did not adapt well to our positions under pressure, and we gave away easy ball losses that lead in the end to a red card that cost us the game today. There are two games today. There’s a game, 11 against 11, which was not our best game, which I was not super happy about, but I did not expect too much after the international break and then they have an early kick-off on Saturday. So that was ok for me. But we were still sloppy and on the counter-attacks we had big, big chances and we were not precise enough and missed a lot of opportunities to finish this game early. Then the second story of the game is we were not able to adapt to one man down. There is no need to concede five goals if you’re one man down with our quality but our defending was clearly not on the level it’s used to being. And I’m in that for the tactical choices, of course they’re my responsibility. It’s hard to accept but there’s no other solution but to accept it and move on forward.”
