Thomas Tuchel felt his Chelsea side were not sharp enough in both boxes against West Brom and will be hoping to rectify that ahead of Wednesday night’s Champions League quarter-final first leg against Porto in Seville.
The Blues were defeated for the first time under the German at the weekend, with West Brom leaving Stamford Bridge with all three points from a crazy game that ended 5-2 to the visitors.
Despite leading through Christian Pulisic, a red card to Thiago Silva tipped the scales of the game and our head coach felt we did not adapt well enough to situation and suggested that our defending was not at the sublime level it has been in recent weeks.
‘We were not sharp enough and we didn’t catch the momentum to be sharper, to be closer and to be more aggressive,’ explained our head coach.
‘We didn’t get tight enough to play as a block and make it harder to break through us. We could do that and then wait for our chances on the counter-attack but we didn’t do this well.
Individually, our defending was not at the level we have become used to from the guys and we need to improve in that sense. It was one of those games where there was a lot of drama in the sense that if things could go wrong, they did go wrong. We got a red card, conceded two goals just before half-time and then we got an injury at half-time to Christian. In the second half, pretty much every shot they had was a goal.
‘We had a few chances for ourselves but pretty quickly we had the feeling that this was not going to be the day where we could turn the score around.’
