Furious Thomas Tuchel questions everything after another ‘impossible’ home defeat

Thomas Tuchel said he needed an “immense” amount of chocolate to get through his rewatch and analysis of our previous defeat at Stamford Bridge, 3-1 to Real Madrid, which followed immediately after another ridiculous defeat, 4-1 to Brentford. On Wednesday night, we made it three home games of absolute nonsense from three, with a 4-2 defat to Arsenal.

Not sure there is enough chocolate in the world for the head coach for this one.

Since the Madrid defeat, we had won three in a row, away to Southampton, away to Real Madrid, and at Wembley against Crystal Palace in the FA Cup semifinal. They weren’t entirely perfect performances, but they showed (reminded) just how special of a team we can be when fully commit and cut out mistakes.

Steps taken forward, and sleepwalking back again. Dragged by the force of some inner tide?

Tuchel was at an absolute loss in his post-match press conference as to why this [SHIRT] was happening again, pointing fingers at everything and anything, from his selection, his tactics, his players, even his groundsmen (“it is a very, very difficult pitch that we have here; it’s not in our favour; the ball bounces very awkwardly”). It was probably the angriest we’ve seen him, and if the hairdryers were out a few weeks ago already, he might be upgrading to flamethrowers now.

“It’s a level of mistakes, the number of mistakes in consecutive games here at home, it’s impossible at this kind of level. You don’t see this. It’s simply impossible, but we’re doing this at the moment, and you cannot win football games like this. [...] How can you make three, two, and one big mistake in matches? How can you? You cannot!”

Two more absolute gifts, both to Eddie Nketiah who hadn’t scored Premier League goal in a year, and a ridiculous penalty at the end (both the call and the actual play) were too much for us to overcome.

Photo by Chloe Knott - Danehouse/Getty Images

Whatever we’re doing wrong, it obviously must not continue. Whoever’s making the mistakes, starters, backups, all, they need to shape up. We have seven games left, plus an FA Cup final. Third place is not under threat (yet), but if we keep [SHIRTING] the bed like this, it soon will be.

“It’s not about individual players. A defensive performance is a team performance, and an offensive performance is a team performance. You need to have the tactics right, which is doubtful I had this right, and you need the team selection right, again it’s doubtful I had this right.

“Then it’s a game for the players. They get full praise when they do it when they did it for the last three matches. And they have to face the reality that it’s impossible to win matches if you make this amount of mistakes of this calibre. It’s simply impossible. I don’t see it in any other matches, but I see it now in consecutive matches of our games, and it has to stop.”

“Look at the penalty, and it is an unbelievable goal from our ball possession. There are no tactics behind that. We have three ball losses in ten seconds. Then we do a foul where there’s not even the slightest danger. We foul a person, it is a penalty, and we rob ourselves of six minutes for an equaliser. What is there to analyse? There’s nothing to analyse.”

“It must be something, but it is also possible to don’t do it because we proved it in the last three matches, and we thought we learned our lesson from Brentford and Real Madrid but obviously not.”

-Thomas Tuchel; source: Football.London

Sunday we go again, with another team coming to the Bridge who will treat victory as if they had just won the title.

Fix this.