Thomas Tuchel is adamant that strikers can flourish at Chelsea but the Blues boss has admitted he needs to keep on working to create the perfect environment for the goals to flow.
Jorginho, Kalidou Koulibaly and Reece James have all found the net already this term, with our forward players hoping this weekend’s trip to Leeds United will be the moment for them to open accounts for 2022/23 and fire us to victory.
The centre-forward conversation at Stamford Bridge is so often framed around the legacies of Didier Drogba and Diego Costa, with those who have come in the intervening periods deemed to have fallen short of the required standards.
Yet Tuchel is wary of feeding the narrative that strikers cannot succeed at Chelsea, insisting instead that they need the right situations to prosper and, citing Romelu Lukaku’s case last season, admitting that everyone must work together to do more.
‘We need to make sure that this is not a self-fulfilling prophecy that we create for ourselves,’ the boss said. ‘I was ready to improve the situation with Romelu. I was ready to give it new thoughts and new energy but it’s not possible so we had a difficult and disappointing year in this relationship.
‘He expected more, we expected more and I expected more of myself, but still we should not create our own self-fulfilling prophecy that the next striker will also not succeed.
‘It’s of course on me to create an environment and a team that creates enough chances that a striker can finally have the last touch in our game and score.’
One idea Tuchel floated this week is to take penalty kicks away from our regular taker Jorginho and hand them instead to the starting striker, though it did not appear the German was seriously considering this given the midfielder’s excellent record from 12 yards.
‘This can also sometimes increase the numbers dramatically if you give these nine or 10 penalties to a striker,’ he mused.
‘It suddenly looks on the statistics much better but who would take a penalty away from Jorginho? We want to win in the end and he’s a fantastic penalty taker.’
However, the head coach does not believe this perception of strikers at Chelsea will dissuade any prospective players from signing, citing the unique mindset of the extrovert forward.
‘Strikers are a very special breed in football,’ he added.
‘They are very sensitive but also very self-confident so I think any striker would like to be the guy to break that struggle.’