Liam Rosenior offered a clear justification for Chelsea’s defensive setup after the club were eliminated from the Carabao Cup by Arsenal on Tuesday. The defeat, decided when Kai Havertz scored in stoppage time, ended a tie that Chelsea had approached having lost the first leg 3\u20132 at Stamford Bridge three weeks earlier.<\/p>\n
Rosenior pointed to two concrete reasons for his selection and shape. He revealed that captain Reece James and first-choice winger Pedro Neto both failed late fitness tests, forcing him to finalise an unusual lineup on the afternoon of the match. The absences, he said, were a factor in switching to a back-three system that saw Jo\u00e3o Pedro lead the defence with Liam Delap deployed on the right wing.<\/p>\n
The performance drew sharp criticism from pundits. \u201cI\u2019m flabbergasted,\u201d Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson gasped. \u201cI can\u2019t believe what I\u2019ve just watched. Chelsea aren\u2019t a bottom-five team. They have World Cup winners.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Wesley] Fofana is crying. He should be crying because they never had a go. They\u2019ve gone out with a whimper in a semi-final. It hasn\u2019t worked. Go out in a blaze of glory, don\u2019t go out like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jamie Redknapp was similarly forthright. \u201cIf you\u2019d have turned up today and not known the score you\u2019d have thought that Chelsea were winning, the way they were playing the game with six at the back, playing cagey and trying to hit on the counter-attack if possible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a semi-final, you\u2019ve got to throw punches.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cole Palmer and Est\u00eav\u00e3o were introduced in the final half hour without altering the outcome. Redknapp also criticised Alejandro Garnacho after his late contribution.<\/p>\n
Rosenior rejected easy hindsight. \u201cI\u2019ve been a pundit, it\u2019s easy in hindsight,\u201d he snapped. \u201cIf I go and attack the game and press really high, people will ask what I am doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can come away from home, press all over the pitch, go man to man and you could go 2\u20130 up or you could go 2\u20130 down. I felt that the psychological aspect of the tie was very important as well. 60 minutes, I bring on Cole [Palmer] and Est\u00eav\u00e3o and the game opens up and we have moments in and around the box.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenior, the former Strasbourg boss, added: \u201cThe reality of my job is if you lose games, you\u2019ll be criticised. If you win, you\u2019re a genius. It\u2019s normally somewhere in between, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta offered a different perspective, calling Chelsea \u201ca really good coached\u201d team which made the tie difficult. \u201cWe knew that we were going to have to play a lot of games within that game,\u201d he said. \u201cEspecially because right from the beginning they changed their setup and they played in a different way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rosenior explained absentees forced his defensive plan after Chelsea bowed out of the Carabao Cup…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1067,190],"tags":[1305,1089,319],"class_list":["post-6502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carabao-cup","category-chelsea","tag-bench-selection","tag-chelsea-struggles","tag-cole-palmer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}