Thomas Tuchel’s pre-match press conference ahead of the crunch visit of Liverpool to Stamford Bridge this weekend was not dominated by the game, Jurgen Klopp, Chelsea’s dip in form or much else for that matter. The Blues boss was asked how Chelsea can get the best out of Lukaku after the striker made a point of saying he was “multi-dimensional” in another interview with ESPN Brasil after the 3-1 win against Aston Villa on Boxing Day.
Thomas Tuchel said: “Training, training, playing. Training, playing, training, sleeping, eating good, training, playing, sleeping, eat good, drink a lot of water, sleep, train and don’t give interviews.”
Of course, that wasn’t the only answer that the eloquent Tuchel gave on the interview, which he was relentlessly pushed on during his press conference while the cameras were off as well as on.
Thomas Tuchel added: “This is exactly the problem we have out of it because you have a quote from another match in another direction and he says he had a chat with me, and then the suggestion comes and it seems the chat was about how he was not happy how we used him. But maybe that was not the chat and we have chats with a lot of players, how we want them to have in position, where they should be when we arrive in certain spaces. This is absolutely a super-normal chat and we have it with Romelu. We have a discussion now where it seems that he was on the bench and we benched him because other players suited our style of playing better. Romelu played when he came, then he got injured, then he caught Covid and when he came back from Covid, he played with no training in Aston Villa and with further no training here, that’s why I’m surprised and I don’t enter in these discussions and like ‘oh, there is something going on’ because there is absolutely zero going on. That’s why I don’t need to understand why he did it. It does not make it better, but that is my situation. And I will not enter in finding reasons now to understand the interview, I don’t want to because I don’t have to and I don’t have a reason. I don’t go now into chats and think ‘did he mean it the other way?’ We have zero problem and, ok, he gave an interview so maybe he has a problem so he needs to speak up. I don’t have one.”
