Another Chelsea loss, another passionate appeal from Rüdiger

Premier League away games have been a major struggle for Chelsea in 2019. Other than a narrow 2-1 win against historically bad Fulham, Chelsea have lost five of six on our domestic travels. The most recent one was this weekend against Everton at Goodison Park, where Chelsea once again failed to convert good chances into goals, then collapsed in the second half to lose 2-0. Incidentally, that was also Everton’s first win for two years (Ed.note: LOL!) against a top six side.

All the good vibes of a the five-match unbeaten run quickly dissipated. The 5-0 hammering of Dynamo Kiev 72 hours prior was nothing but a false dawn.

Another bad loss. Time for some of the usual post-match quotes from the usual suspects. Here’s Antonio Rüdiger with the passionate, angry response.

“It’s unacceptable the way we came out, and we lost the game in 10 minutes. We played a good first half, and we could have scored one or two, but we didn’t. The way we approached the second half is not acceptable. We were passive, and if you are passive against any opponent in this league, it’s dangerous. It was like the same game against Wolves [last week], just this time we lost.”

If he’s said it once, he’s said a million times. And yet it’s happened again. Perhaps this is our level and no amount of angry remonstrations from the passionate center back will make any difference at the moment. Still, we’ve got to try. Maybe this time we’ll listen?

“We still have eight games to go, but we cannot always say ‘next week, next week, next week’. We really have to do better, definitely, because we were not allowed to lose this match.”

-Antonio Rüdiger; source: Chelsea FC

Eight games to go. Four teams, separated by four points, vying for two spots. But Chelsea are at the bottom of that pile, and we’ll certainly need to do better than in our last three league games (since that rousing 2-0 win over Spurs) if we are to have any hope of getting up and out of the Europa League.