Explaining Thomas Tuchel’s brutal ‘toughen up’ message to Chelsea’s defenders
By Liam Twomey
After a limp 2-1 defeat to Southampton at St Mary’s on Tuesday evening, head coach Thomas Tuchel kept his analysis blunt and simple.
“Soft, soft, soft defending,” he said. “What stops that? Pure mentality. Stop it by pure mentality. Stop it with defending mentality.
“There is no superiority for the opponent. There is no need to give shots away, there is no need. Just toughen up as a team and show a different mentality. It’s my assessment. I don’t like to talk about it normally because you can’t prove it with data, the body positioning, tactical position in the field or whatever.
“But it’s like this: both goals are cheap goals, soft goals, and should not happen if you expect to win a Premier League match in the evening at an away stadium. We need to be tougher than that.”
Tuchel’s singling out of Chelsea’s defensive shortcomings should come as no surprise. His early success at Stamford Bridge was built primarily upon one of the meanest defensive units in Europe. But the borderline impenetrable rearguard that revived a drifting 2020-21 season, kept Manchester City out of the Champions League final in Porto and took the club to the top of the Premier League in the latter half of 2021 began to slip long before this week’s trip to the south coast.
It feels especially significant that Chelsea play West Ham this weekend because the tipping point for Tuchel’s defensive problems can be traced back to a sloppy 3-2 defeat against the same opponents at London Stadium in December 2021. They went into the game top of the Premier League by a point and twice led, but a misguided Jorginho backpass led to Edouard Mendy bringing down Jarrod Bowen to concede a penalty. The goalkeeper was then beaten from longer range by a Bowen shot and a sliced Arthur Masuaku cross.
The result precipitated a December slump that derailed Chelsea’s title challenge, and Tuchel has never re-established the same level of solidity at the back. Instead, a steady stream of individual errors and collective failures, combined with an attacking unit that has never been precise or clinical enough to be considered elite, has seen results suffer.
If you divide Tuchel’s tenure as Chelsea head coach into two parts — the 33 Premier League matches preceding the West Ham loss and the 29 games since — it is clear from the expected goals against (xGA) per game that there has been a significant drop-off at the team’s defensive end.
Chelsea conceded significantly fewer goals than expected before the West Ham loss (19 goals in 33 matches) and slightly more than expected since (35 goals in 29 matches). Some supporters may be inclined to point the finger at Mendy, given that the drop-off has coincided with mistakes creeping more regularly into his game.
But defensive success or failure is always collective. Mendy cannot be the sole reason Chelsea have transformed from a clean-sheet machine at the start of Tuchel’s tenure to a team expected to concede at least one goal every Premier League match.
At the other end, the expected goals per game data for Chelsea’s attack has remained more stable — though it is worth noting a relatively small but persistent under-performance relative to xG, which underlines why Tuchel has been so eager to work with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang again.
It was hoped that, having quickly established Chelsea as one of Europe’s best defensive and pressing teams, Tuchel would gradually bring the team’s attack up to an elite level too. Instead, it has remained flawed in familiar ways and defensive standards have slipped, even while the head coach has largely kept faith with a 3-4-2-1 system geared towards structural stability that is arguably ill-suited to most of the attackers he inherited.
Romelu Lukaku, Timo Werner and Callum Hudson-Odoi have left, while Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic are far from happy with their situations. Mason Mount and Kai Havertz have performed best in Tuchel’s system but both are struggling in the early weeks of the new season. Overhauling the squad’s attacking options has been an unwelcome complication for new Chelsea owners whose most pressing priority in their first summer window was rebuilding a defence that lost Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen for nothing.
Tuchel can cite personnel changes in mitigation. Kalidou Koulibaly and Marc Cucurella are both still adapting to their new surroundings, and Wesley Fofana will need time to do the same. The collective chemistry of Cesar Azpilicueta, Thiago Silva, Rudiger and Christensen on the road to Porto will take time to recreate with a new group — and the learning curve will be steeper with a midfield deprived of N’Golo Kante for a significant time.
But the defensive decline began with Rudiger and Christensen still at Stamford Bridge. The bottom line is that Chelsea are not elite at either end of the pitch right now, and have not been so for most of 2022. The early evidence of this season is even more concerning: after the first five Premier League matches of 2022-23, they have a negative expected goal difference (6.95 xG vs 7.52 xGC, according to Opta).
Within that context, an underwhelming return of seven points from five games is pretty fair. The attack remains a problem but Tuchel’s most urgent task is to make Chelsea a great defensive team again. Having spent more than £150million ($175m) on Koulibaly, Cucurella and Fofana, owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital will expect nothing less.
https://theathletic.com/3553234/2022/09/01/chelsea-defence-thomas-tuchel-criticism/
Explaining Thomas Tuchel’s brutal ‘toughen up’ message to Chelsea’s defenders
By Liam Twomey
After a limp 2-1 defeat to Southampton at St Mary’s on Tuesday evening, head coach Thomas Tuchel kept his analysis blunt and simple.
“Soft, soft, soft defending,” he said. “What stops that? Pure mentality. Stop it by pure mentality. Stop it with defending mentality.
“There is no superiority for the opponent. There is no need to give shots away, there is no need. Just toughen up as a team and show a different mentality. It’s my assessment. I don’t like to talk about it normally because you can’t prove it with data, the body positioning, tactical position in the field or whatever.
“But it’s like this: both goals are cheap goals, soft goals, and should not happen if you expect to win a Premier League match in the evening at an away stadium. We need to be tougher than that.”
Tuchel’s singling out of Chelsea’s defensive shortcomings should come as no surprise. His early success at Stamford Bridge was built primarily upon one of the meanest defensive units in Europe. But the borderline impenetrable rearguard that revived a drifting 2020-21 season, kept Manchester City out of the Champions League final in Porto and took the club to the top of the Premier League in the latter half of 2021 began to slip long before this week’s trip to the south coast.
It feels especially significant that Chelsea play West Ham this weekend because the tipping point for Tuchel’s defensive problems can be traced back to a sloppy 3-2 defeat against the same opponents at London Stadium in December 2021. They went into the game top of the Premier League by a point and twice led, but a misguided Jorginho backpass led to Edouard Mendy bringing down Jarrod Bowen to concede a penalty. The goalkeeper was then beaten from longer range by a Bowen shot and a sliced Arthur Masuaku cross.
The result precipitated a December slump that derailed Chelsea’s title challenge, and Tuchel has never re-established the same level of solidity at the back. Instead, a steady stream of individual errors and collective failures, combined with an attacking unit that has never been precise or clinical enough to be considered elite, has seen results suffer.
If you divide Tuchel’s tenure as Chelsea head coach into two parts — the 33 Premier League matches preceding the West Ham loss and the 29 games since — it is clear from the expected goals against (xGA) per game that there has been a significant drop-off at the team’s defensive end.
Chelsea conceded significantly fewer goals than expected before the West Ham loss (19 goals in 33 matches) and slightly more than expected since (35 goals in 29 matches). Some supporters may be inclined to point the finger at Mendy, given that the drop-off has coincided with mistakes creeping more regularly into his game.
But defensive success or failure is always collective. Mendy cannot be the sole reason Chelsea have transformed from a clean-sheet machine at the start of Tuchel’s tenure to a team expected to concede at least one goal every Premier League match.
At the other end, the expected goals per game data for Chelsea’s attack has remained more stable — though it is worth noting a relatively small but persistent under-performance relative to xG, which underlines why Tuchel has been so eager to work with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang again.
It was hoped that, having quickly established Chelsea as one of Europe’s best defensive and pressing teams, Tuchel would gradually bring the team’s attack up to an elite level too. Instead, it has remained flawed in familiar ways and defensive standards have slipped, even while the head coach has largely kept faith with a 3-4-2-1 system geared towards structural stability that is arguably ill-suited to most of the attackers he inherited.
Romelu Lukaku, Timo Werner and Callum Hudson-Odoi have left, while Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic are far from happy with their situations. Mason Mount and Kai Havertz have performed best in Tuchel’s system but both are struggling in the early weeks of the new season. Overhauling the squad’s attacking options has been an unwelcome complication for new Chelsea owners whose most pressing priority in their first summer window was rebuilding a defence that lost Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen for nothing.
Tuchel can cite personnel changes in mitigation. Kalidou Koulibaly and Marc Cucurella are both still adapting to their new surroundings, and Wesley Fofana will need time to do the same. The collective chemistry of Cesar Azpilicueta, Thiago Silva, Rudiger and Christensen on the road to Porto will take time to recreate with a new group — and the learning curve will be steeper with a midfield deprived of N’Golo Kante for a significant time.
But the defensive decline began with Rudiger and Christensen still at Stamford Bridge. The bottom line is that Chelsea are not elite at either end of the pitch right now, and have not been so for most of 2022. The early evidence of this season is even more concerning: after the first five Premier League matches of 2022-23, they have a negative expected goal difference (6.95 xG vs 7.52 xGC, according to Opta).
Within that context, an underwhelming return of seven points from five games is pretty fair. The attack remains a problem but Tuchel’s most urgent task is to make Chelsea a great defensive team again. Having spent more than £150million ($175m) on Koulibaly, Cucurella and Fofana, owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital will expect nothing less.
https://theathletic.com/3553234/2022/09/01/chelsea-defence-thomas-tuchel-criticism/
