Potter ‘disappointed’ as ‘below par’ Chelsea drop two more points

After about 50 minutes of quality football to finish out the calendar year, Chelsea were back to playing badly today as we dropped two more points in our first visit to the City Ground in over 23 years.

Not even Graham Potter was able to sugarcoat this result against a Nottingham Forest team struggling at the wrong end of the table, though he still only managed a “disappointing” and a “below par”. Then again, this just might be our current level, if we’re truly “being honest”, which would make it more of an “expected” and “par for the course”.

“It was overall below par for us.

“You have to credit Forest, they did what they did well. We didn’t do well enough when we had control. Not easy to create against Forest because they can defend deep and attack spaces well. We can improve that. We suffered in the second half so in the end it’s a performance we’re not happy with, we have to accept the point but we are disappointed.

“[We] dropped points [because] our overall performance wasn’t good. We have to be honest and try to improve. The substitutes came on and helped us [so] there were some things but we’re disappointed.”

When you fail to win often, you sure have to credit the opposition often, don’t you?

Steve Cooper, man with three wins on the season, thoroughly out-managed, out-tacticed, out-motivated our Chosen Coach, with a first-half setup to suffocate (defeated by just a lucky bounce) and a second-half switch to dominate, to which we didn’t really have an answer (only able to stem the flow somewhat and only after they had equalized). Chelsea were badly outplayed in that second 45 and in retrospect, our first-half control was little more than Forest allowing us time on the ball in non-dangerous areas.

That makes any question about top-four prospects an absolute joke, but someone did ask it so:

“It’s always tough because you have a lot of big teams with lots of top players and coaches. We need to focus on the next match but clearly we have a long way to go.”

-Graham Potter; source: BBC Sport

Well, we do have some top players...