Thomas Tuchel took the much needed hard-line with his players this weekend after they delivered yet another poor performance.
After a string of bad results and underperforming, Chelsea were lacklustre once again as they threw away a 2-0 lead to draw 2-2 with Wolves, making them have to fight for a top four place in these last few matches.
Sources: Chelsea eyeing Benoît Badiashile and Edmund Tapsoba for defender reinforcements.
This led Tuchel to call his players in to Cobham the day after the game to have a meeting and do some training. This tough love option was greeted with some reports that the players were unhappy about being called in.
But as the German boss points out, he too had to come in on his day off and he says he is not expecting to be loved by his players. Tuchel believes if you want to be loved by people then you shouldn’t be a football coach!
“I also had some plans on Sunday morning and they were cancelled, but this happens,” Tuchel explained ahead of Chelsea’s trip to Leeds as cited by Football London. “It is a very normal process. If you want to be loved on a daily basis, you should not become a football coach at a high level. It will simply not happen.
“And whatever decisions you take – taking players out, leaving them out – if you have a reason my experience is to give the reason and then what can he do? He needs to accept it. He signed for Chelsea and this is the decision. If you do it randomly, without reason, and be super-unreliable, then it’s maybe harder to take. But we did it in an atmosphere still where everybody feels absolutely responsible.
“It’s not like I bring you [the players] in because you’re not good and I punish you now. This is not the atmosphere in which we did it. But listen, they accept it. I have the feeling they believe and trust in this kind of mentality that we did this together. I have my part in it. Everybody was here and the reaction to it was very nice because they then stayed, spoke with each other, and we used the Sunday morning to go over it.
“So we then had the Monday free for training and not the Monday for talking about the game, digesting, and then ending up with Tuesday only [to train]. It was nice. We just cleared the air and sometimes it’s necessary. That’s why we said, ‘Come on, let’s just do it on Sunday morning’. Then we have time to give ourselves the freedom to prepare for the [Leeds] match on Monday and Tuesday.”
