Thomas Tuchel is clear where Chelsea must improve upon our performance against Manchester City with Juventus away on the horizon, and he has also issued an update on Mason Mount’s chances of playing in that Champions League group game on Wednesday.
Confidence to play the way his players know they can play is needed again, and that would be the first requirement whether facing a team of the stature of the Italians next or not.‘We don't care against who we play, we do our thing and we need to be better,’ Tuchel explains.‘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 says the game is being given all the self-reflection needed, and he added:‘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.’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, and his participation against Juventus is in question.‘I absolutely don't know, we have to see,’ is Tuchel’s latest update. ‘In the end it will be a matter of hours as to whether he makes it or not.’However 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,’ says his manager.
‘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.’