Another game, another Chelsea defeat with ‘a lot of positives there’ for Graham Potter

As the chorus of boos echoed around the swathes of empty seats in Stamford Bridge at full time and Chelsea sank into the bottom half of the table with a negative goal difference, we were left to reflect yet again on a most disappointing result and performance.

Prior to the match, head coach Graham Potter said that we only needed to improve in two basic aspects of the game — is that all? — defending better and attacking better. Thankfully, we have him, the most awesomest of awesome head coaches, who has shown repeatedly and consistently over the past nearly six months that he’s very good at instilling these fundamental concepts into a group of players, while making solid, consistent, reasonable decisions with lineups, personnel changes, and tactics.

Defensive mistakes, chance creation, chance conversion, uninspired patterns of attack, lack of concentration — these are now things of the distant, prehistoric past. Trusting the process. Big project! Much wow. Losing 2-0 at home to midtable opposition, who expected a tough game, had a plan, and thus fairly easily took home three points instead? We would never.

And then I woke up. And looked at the date. And then I woke up.

Not sure when Potter himself’s going to wake up (or his superiors, for that matter), but he’s once again spotted “lots” of positives in this latest ridiculous defeat, his 8th in 22 Premier League matches in charge of Chelsea (to go along with 7 wins and 7 defeats; all things balanced, as they should be in mediocrity). You would think after all these games with all these positives that we would be the best team on the face of the Earth!

“The players gave everything, they took on the responsibility, they tried, they had lots of entries into the box and shots and attacks. Ultimately we conceded a poor first goal which makes everything very emotional and rightly so. We’re disappointed because we’re 1-0 down but the players responded well they kept on responding throughout. The second goal is disappointing because we started the second half well.

“But if you look at the stats apart from the main one there is a lot of positives there. But at the moment into doesn’t feel too positive. After a defeat there is always a disappointment. There is always a feeling we have not moved forward, that’s fair to say. We have to analyse the performance and look at the things we’ve done well and what we can do better. Defensively we’ve left ourselves too open but again if you look at the stats of the game we had chances ourselves, we had one-v-ones, but the most important thing, putting the ball into the net, we were second-best.”

Can’t wait for more positives on Tuesday! Liverpool, smarting from the smacking they got from Manchester City today, come to town and gosh aren’t we just lucky to be playing them it’s such a great opportunity.

“I don’t like to blame anybody, I have to take responsibility. We are a team, we have to stay together, we are together. We win or lose together. We will recover and we will prepare for the next game. We need to respond, that’s clear. But we look forward to it.”