Thomas Tuchel believes the lasting effects of Chelsea’s Club World Cup triumph were to blame for the Blues’ uninspiring performance in Saturday’s victory over Crystal Palace.
Chelsea returned to Premier League action for the first time since being crowned world champions and needed an 89th-minute winner from Hakim Ziyech to break the deadlock at Selhurst Park.
It was hardly a display fitting of their new title, but Tuchel revealed his side’s return from Abu Dhabi had led to a tumultuous build-up, the Blues swapping the heat of the UAE for south London and Storm Eunice.
“We come from a 30 degree temperature difference, six players have got a cold from the AC on the plane, we’ve had players jet-lagged,” Tuchel said. “We have almost no players who slept well in Abu Dhabi because of the temperature difference.
“There’s a lot of pressure involved as well in trying to win a World Cup.
“We didn’t play Premier League for four weeks. It’s a huge strange mix of a lot of reasons why I didn’t over-expect today performance-wise. We had some issues yesterday in training yesterday, [Cesar] Azpilicueta and Callum Hudson-Odoi went out. This is where we are and it is like this, I know we can play better, we want to play better, we were at least defensively solid.
“We have a clean sheet and it’s not the first 1-0 we have.”
The nature of the gritty victory will give encouragement to Tuchel, whose side’s title challenge has been derailed by a number of draws over the winter months.
“I think every team in a season like this will have games like this especially in December, January, February time, where conditions can cause huge adversity on top of strengths of opponent,” the German continued.
“This was it, if you play this game if we had another draw we would talk about it longer so if you win it late you can move on and forget it, take the positive energy out of it and take it into the next game. You don’t have to think about it too much and we don’t have to wake up tomorrow thinking ‘Could we have done better?’.”
