Chelsea suffered their first defeat of the Premier League season after losing to Manchester City 0-1 on Saturday.
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Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel has emphasised the importance of the performance level needed at the top flight, and how the Blues were not at their usual high standards against Manchester City. Chelsea suffered their first defeat of the Premier League season after losing to Man City 0-1 on Saturday. The home side were beaten by a deflected strike from Gabriel Jesus early in the second half, which proved enough to claim all three points for Pep Guardiola’s men. “We don’t care against who we play, we do our thing and we need to be better,” Tuchel was quoted as saying by the club’s website.
“It’s about making opponents underperform. City did this to us, they had high ball wins. We talked about the high pressing but with our decision-making I never felt fully confident we would escape the pressure with short passes. I never felt fully confident when we decided to go for long balls. We have Romelu upfront who we can put long balls into, but without that genuine belief and confidence, and also without the moments where you really hurt your opponent, it gets more and more difficult, and this is how the game went on Saturday.
“When we escaped the pressure, which was hard enough, we took bad decisions in playing into our strikers. When we played it into our strikers, they took bad decisions in the first contact and lost the ball. So you lose more and more belief and it was simply not a good enough performance to deserve more.”
Tuchel also spoke about the importance of maintaining the kind of performances needed at this level. “If you play at this level, we always look at performance, we never look at results. We want to have the results as a consequence of our performances. In the very toughest games you need to be at the very best level in all parts of the game, and we were clearly not,” he added.
Mason Mount could not play a part against Man City having been ruled out ahead of the game due to an injury picked up in the cup win over Aston Villa three days earlier. With Juventus looming next in the Champions League, Tuchel said, “I absolutely don’t know, we have to see. In the end it will be a matter of hours as to whether he makes it or not.”
Another English midfielder, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, was given action for the third game running. “I was happy with Ruben, otherwise he could not have had the chance to come on,” he explained. “He played against Zenit and he played against Aston Villa, and now he played this 15 minutes. He could not be involved without deserving it.”
Recently, Thomas Tuchel admitted that his side were not at their best against a solid Manchester City team at Stamford Bridge on Saturday. “We lost the game and City deserved to win,” Tuchel was quoted as saying by the club’s website. “For 60 minutes, until the goal, we were very strong in the last [defensive] 20 metres of the field but only there unfortunately. The other 80 metres, we were not good enough. We were never on our highest level. You cannot expect to get a result. It could turn around maybe with one header but we have to accept it was not our best game.”
