Chelsea have a mammoth task on their hands as they make the trip to Madrid to try and overturn a 3-1 defeat in the Champions League quarter-finals. Real Madrid got the better of Thomas Tuchel ’s men at Stamford Bridge as Karim Benzema’s hat-trick was the key difference between the two.
It means that the German will be looking for his side to overturn the two-goal deficit at the Bernabeu to stop them from crashing out of the competition. Given the difficulty of the situation, the manager has given his team a slim chance of making it through.
Speaking in his pre-match press conference, he said: “Not the biggest chance given the first game's results and given the competition and the opponent and the stadium we play. We never manage our input and our effort and our belief by the chances we have for our result.
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“We never did and we will not start tomorrow by giving less because it is very unlikely that we make it. It is unlikely but it is worth trying and trying means that we will play to our fullest and to our full limit because this is what we do and we never manage our input and investment by the chances of having a result.”
While it is a slim chance, crazier comebacks have happened in the competition and the removal of the away goal rule means that the Blues only need to score two goals to level up the game rather than last year’s rules that would knock them out in that scenario. So the odds, while stacked against them, are still somewhat feasible.
That is something backed up by predictors FiveThirtyEight, who are experts in football stats and predictions. They have given the Blues an 11 percent chance of making it to the final four. They then give a four percent chance of making the final and a two percent chance of winning the competition again.
It underlines just how much of an outside shot they have, but one that could slim down if they score early in Madrid. Whether they manage to defend the title or not remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be the first time they battled against the odds under Tuchel if they did.
