Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel is looking forward to meeting up with “very funny guy” Ralph Hasenhuttl when Saints visit Stamford Bridge tomorrow.
Thomas Tuchel said: “We meet each other now regularly because we played against each other in the Bundesliga and now here and we met once in Paris for some days, we meet of course in coaches’ meetings. He’s a very friendly, very nice guy, very humble, very entertaining also, a very funny guy. The teams he trains have always the same philosophy. It’s high intensity, it’s very aggressive, it’s about ball recoveries and this is on a very high level. They have a very fast team, a very aggressive team, they had good results against both Manchester teams, so this is what we are expecting, a good team with a good coach and a nice guy, but that does not count for 90 minutes. We have developed some ideas and some solutions of course to deal with this high pressure. In general you need to be absolutely aware of it. You don’t have time to think when you’re on the ball, we need to anticipate situations, we need to be very good in the timing and distance of our passing, if we want to escape high pressure in our own half. It can also be a possibility to use long balls to escape high pressing, but then you need to have a good position before. The most important thing is that we are aware and that we don’t judge teams by their name or their ranking or their previous results, but we talk about what we see and their behaviour and we need to be aware of an aggressive and an intense team. We want to also have the answer to the pressing from Southampton with counter-pressing and to give them a taste of their own medicine, also because it is a part of our game.”
The pair previously worked in the Bundesliga at the same time when Hasenhuttl’s Leipzig faced off against Tuchel’s Borussia Dortmund. Asked about his relationship with Hasenhuttl,
