Cahill wants to brush Chelsea’s collapse against Newcastle under the carpet

There are two main ways to deal with Sunday’s hilariously poor 3-0 defeat at St James’.

We either do a deep dive on everything that went wrong on the day, as well as the season and possibly the seasons leading up to this season, apportioning blame and responsibility appropriately between the club, the squad, and the coaches ... or we just simply ignore it, forget it, and deal with Saturday’s FA Cup final in isolation.

While the former does need to happen at some point, the latter is probably the better way to go about things right now. It’s probably too late to fix any systemic issues at this point anyway. What 3-0 defeat to Newcastle?

“It’s time to self-reflect. Prior to Huddersfield we were in great form. We have to try and brush it under the carpet. That’s not an excuse, any other time I wouldn’t be saying that, but we have a massive week now to prepare for a cup final which is very important for us.”

Serenity now.

Insanity later.

“It was a below-par performance by ourselves. For whatever reason, we were way off the pace. Newcastle made it very difficult for us early on. They started very well, but there were sloppy things from us: sloppy passes, things we shouldn’t be doing, so we are very disappointed in the dressing room.

“There were individual mistakes here, there and everywhere which was putting us under extreme amounts of pressure. That’s not in our make-up.

“It looked to me like everyone had one eye on the cup final, which is very dangerous. We are very lucky that the game was somewhat irrelevant in the end as Liverpool won, because if we had come off that pitch with that performance having thrown a Champions League spot away, it would have been extremely hard to take.”

-Gary Cahill; source: Chelsea FC

Since everybody had one eye on the FA Cup final already, we’re going to do really, really well in it, right?

Hmm...