Thomas Tuchel reveals he got angry with Chelsea players over poor results
Thomas Tuchel held a meeting with his players on Thursday to urge that they wake up after consecutive damaging home defeats, having stayed up the previous night watching reruns of the reverse against Real Madrid that left Chelsea’s Champions League defence hanging by a thread.
The Chelsea squad were forced to sit through what Tuchel described as “not a discussion meeting … more that I gave my point of view” on the back of Real’s 3-1 win in the quarter-final first leg and the 4-1 Premier League thrashing by Brentford. Tuchel said no blame was apportioned but made no secret of his concern about their form since returning from the international break.
“I felt how untypical these kinds of mistakes and performances were for us,” he said when asked if clearing the air might lead to a change in fortunes. “That led to my reaction. I don’t know if it’s a turning point. You need to take care about the process and right now it was to be honest with the team, explain your reactions and why it is like this. It is necessary the players see, and can handle if the manager is angry.”
Tuchel thought his players had subconsciously operated at a lower tempo after coming back from their national teams. “Somehow after the international break we had the feeling like we play with 80%, 90% and we hope to get away with it, and it is not like this,” he said. “There are a lot of reasons, which can be reasons that you feel exhausted. But you need to overcome it. There is no other way and we need to kind of wake up, or remind ourselves again that the investment physically was not enough in the last two matches. We need to find high-intensity work again because this is what we do
and this is what we lacked in the last two matches.”
Immediately after the defeat on Wednesday night Tuchel, who was on entertaining and expansive form despite his disappointment, declared Chelsea’s hopes of a comeback at the Bernabéu on Tuesday to be nonexistent. He explained that his postmatch anger had taken uncharacteristically long to abate. “That I stay angry overnight is pretty unusual, yes,” he said. “But the feeling lasted. I watched the match again and I got angry at home, in the middle of the night, and the next morning I watched it again and got angry again.
“You sit there in the middle of the night and the amount of chocolate I needed was immense to go through the match again and compensate. It’s not nice, you start writing and writing and writing and at some point you press the button to watch it in double speed, just so it passes quicker, and then you know you’re not in a good place. At some point you have to stop and take a walk into the kitchen or lounge, and calm down.”
Tuchel hopes for a response when Chelsea visit Southampton on Saturday. Romelu Lukaku and Hakim Ziyech are both doubts and were due to be tested before the team travelled.