Chelsea manager Graham Potter has been told he must be more like Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp in post-match interviews. The Blues drew their latest Premier League match against West Ham on Saturday, although a controversial penalty decision went against the visitors late into their game against the Hammers.
With the contest level just before the 90th minute mark, Conor Gallagher's shot was blocked by the arm of Tomas Soucek but neither VAR or on-pitch referee Craig Pawson felt giving a penalty was the correct decision.
Joao Felix had given Chelsea the lead early in the first half guiding home an Enzo Fernandez cross, before Emerson Palmieri equalised for the Hammers against his old club. The Blues had two goals disallowed in the first half with Soucek also seeing what he thought was a late winner ruled out for offside.
READ MORE: Rio Ferdinand and Joe Cole agree on major penalty incident in West Ham vs Chelsea clash
After an exciting end-to-end first half, neither team registered a shot on target in the second 45 minutes, with the points therefore being shared between the two London outfits. The penalty incident dominated much of the post-match talk, with Potter also giving his verdict on whether he felt it should have been a penalty or not.
He said: "Looks it [obvious], but these are the little things that you need to go in your favour and at the moment they’re not.
"That’s life, nothing to complain about there, it’s just we have to keep working. There were positives in how we wanted to play today, and some good attacking moments with players who are adapting to the Premier League. That’s where we’re at, so we just have to keep moving forward."
The approach from Potter to take the controversial decision on the chin and not kick up a fuss was subsequently picked apart by both Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand, who namedropped a number of other managers who would've effectively driven the narrative, using that penalty decision, coming out of the game taking away any pressure from their team.
Ferdinand told BT Sport: "You look at a Jurgen Klopp or a Pep Guardiola or [Jose] Mourinho in years gone by at Chelsea, Mourinho would have been at it in that presser today and it would have been the story of tomorrow.
"The back page would have been ‘Mourinho slams VAR,’ and it takes the gloss off what happened on the pitch. There were some bits you could improve on with Chelsea, that would not have been the focus but probably will be now with the money spent, the influx of players, etcetera. You can negate that by controlling the narrative from that presser there."
Cole then added to Ferdinand's verdict of how Potter should have handled the penalty question by agreeing with the former Manchester United defender's point about how differently people's opinions coming out of the game would then be.
"I’m not surprised because he’s always diplomatic, he’s going a fantastic job, but I think if he had someone in his staff who’s maybe been at that level, managed at that level, you need to cause a bit of an uproar because it does two things," the former Chelsea midfielder said.
"It takes the deflection from the bad elements of your performance, and it also puts it on VAR. It cost Chelsea a chance to win the game there, through no fault of their own. You can dissect the performance of the team Monday morning, go through it and build on that, but if I was advising him now I’d say ‘look, come out and make a thing of it.’
"Let these Chelsea fans leave the stadium feeling hard done by instead of thinking ‘why didn’t we beat West Ham? We’ve signed all these players.’ It changes the narrative of the story."
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