Well, I’m pretty gutted after that.
I thought we were excellent in the first half and were probably the better side overall.
Axel Tuanzebe failed to stand up against Lukaku and it cost us, as we had a few chances and couldn’t score.
I suppose that’s the difference when you sign a £90 odd million player, but I thought we looked the more creative, worked harder and generally did the brighter stuff.
It was enough to make Chelsea, in their extremely quiet stadium (and that’s not a dig, just pure fact) look the inferior side, even if they’d had the majority of the possession.
The second half started okay, but then Mings seemed to totally lose his edge and concentration to allow a ball through to Lukaku again for an easy second.
I’ve consistently made no secret about my dislike for Mings. For an England international some of the stuff he does is ridiculous in a bad way. I’d be happy to see him gone and rate Konsa, who, it’s noticeable just doesn’t make those sort of mistakes, much higher.
Whatever, you could see it totally deflated the team and just took the edge off the game, as it was blatantly obvious that the result had been decided.
What else? Ah the ref, Stuart Atwell.
Well, I thought he was a total disgrace today. His early booking of Ramsey was definitely deserved, but wow, some of the decisions against us were harsh, while many of theirs went in their favour.
I never call refs out, but I feel his performance today needs looking into. Not that it will make any difference.
Otherwise, I was very pleased with what I saw.
I said that I expected a decent performance and I think we definitely got that in the first half. We worked hard, playing intelligently with purpose and all that we missed was a goal or two. As late as the last five minutes, I thought we were playing nice, fast football to feet and didn’t look to be lacking sharpness/fitness even at the end.
This was never a 3-0 game and we’d have troubled many teams today. It’s no disgrace to lose to Chelsea and I’m not worried after today’s showing.
Keep that up and it’ll start to come together, in my opinion.
