Chelsea manager Mauricio Pochettino has called on the players to grow and improve even further having suffered the pain of a 1-0 late defeat to Liverpool in last weekend’s EFL Cup final.
It was a difficult day for pretty much everyone at Wembley Stadium, and after a very passive and lacklustre display in extra time that few major bookmakers, like Bettors Tanzania, would have seen coming, plenty of pundits were more than happy to pile on with criticism of their own – in particular Gary Neville with his ‘Blue billion pound bottle jobs’ crack.
Whilst Pochettino was well aware of the difficulties we continue to face, and the likelihood that the 2023/24 campaign would now end in severe disappointment, and without the improvement we were all hoping to see, he rejected much of the criticism as being overblown, feeling that there were positives to be taken given the age and experience of the squad we had out on show.
“I didn’t hear what he said, but if you compare the age of the two groups, I think it is similar. It is true we didn’t keep the energy of how we finished the second half. I don’t know how you can describe this situation. But I feel proud. I feel proud of the players, I think they made a big effort.”
Pochettino repeated the ‘young team’ line, and dismissed that with their injuries we had suddenly become favourites to win, or that we actually had a major advantage here, referencing the fact that the ‘dynamics are completely different’ when you compare the sides, and that did not change just because our opposition ended the game with a few young players of their own on the pitch.
Sadly for the gaffer, whilst some fans may have sympathy for his outlook here, the fact remains we wasted a host of good opportunities in this one, and the history books will now record six successive Wembley final defeats, with three of those being against Liverpool themselves.
Whilst we have had injuries of our own to contend with this year, and the press are making a big play out of who Liverpool were missing to build up how great an opportunity this was for the Argentine to lift a major English trophy, the problem plenty of Chelsea fans will have is in the fact they have a point and are not really wrong.
Our actual performance in the 90 minutes, in some ways probably proves that, but for whatever reason, we just could not sustain those efforts through the period of extra time. Whether Pochettino was right that our problem was mentality and the players lost hope that it would be our day after the chances that we had spurned, is open for debate.
The defeat will also do nothing but intensify the talk about his potential future as a manager either.
See More:
- Mauricio Pochettino hails work-rate of his Chelsea players after FA Cup win
- Mauricio Pochettino wants his Chelsea players to hurt after EFL Cup final loss
