Chelsea suffered a 3-1 loss at the hands of Everton in the Premier League this weekend and next up they welcome Lille in the Champions League.
The Blues are yet to secure qualification to the knockout stages of the UCL meaning they have all to play for against the French side. And in such a scenario, Everton might have exposed a major weakness in Lampard’s young side.
At Goodison Park, the Chelsea players were sloppy for most of the 90 minutes but apart from that, the Everton players also managed to bully the visitors for large parts of the game.
And according to Frank Lampard, his players have to quickly adapt to the physicality of the game and being young and inexperienced does not amount to a good enough excuse.
‘They have to get used to it quickly,’ Lampard said via Chelsea FC.
‘I can give them a tiny bit of room maybe for the youth of some of the team but at the same time, they might be young but they are not silly.
‘They know physical contact happens in games like the Everton one. The game gets broken up, the ball goes direct into your box, it is another thing to deal with and we just have to deal with it better.
‘There are home truths all the time, whatever game you play and players consistently need to hear that. I have a good bunch and in the Premier League with the competitive nature of it, there are going to be difficult patches and times when you lose games.
‘It is certainly not the end of the world but it is important that we take on board lessons from games like Saturday and West Ham, because we had a week when we were poor, fantastic, and poor again, so that lack of consistency is not going to get us where we want to be.’
Going into their final Champions League match this week, Chelsea are third in their group table meaning they will have to pick up all three points in order to move to the next round.
