Pulisic happy to show off goalscoring skills, especially with Abramovich watching

Chelsea may be winning games and scoring goals for fun, but obviously we’re still just in preseason and things won’t actually count until ten days from now, when we travel to Old Trafford to take on Manchester United. But that’s probably a good thing, too, seeing as how we’re also leaking goals at an alarming rate, especially from set pieces. If nothing else, I guess we’ll be entertaining.

One man who was having plenty of fun on Wednesday in Austria was big-money new arrival Christian Pulisic, who created one and scored two in a ten-minute burst in the first-half again Salzburg. They were his first two goals for the club and while, again, it’s just preseason and they don’t really count for the official record, they do count for the unofficial confidence.

“It was a big relief to score my first goals for Chelsea. Being a new signing and coming into the club, I felt I needed to prove myself and wanted to show the guys early on, especially my team-mates, that I can play too. Hopefully I have done that a bit and earned their respect.

“It’s what I’m out there to do. I’m in an attacking position. I want to score goals, I want to help with assists and do a lot of good things. I’m not trying to fill the gap left by Eden, he was an unbelievable player. I want to be my own player, to look at me like that, do the best I can for the team.”

Comparisons with Eden will be inevitable of course, regardless of what Pulisic may or may not say, but that comes with the territory. If he can stop worrying about it and just play up to the best of his abilities, we’re all be pretty happy, methinks, including Roman Abramovich, who was able to attend the game on Wednesday and even pay a brief visit to the players afterwards.

“I wasn’t thinking about the owner being there when I scored. But it’s great, he said ‘hello’ to us after and it was a good night. He said ‘welcome to the club’, just being nice.”

-Christian Pulisic; source: Goal

Let’s hope the next time they meet is for trophy celebrations, rather than a crisis meeting.