Chelsea suffered their first defeat of the 2020/21 season, going down 2-0 at the hands of defending Premier League champions Liverpool on Sunday.
The Blues were going toe-to-toe with Liverpool up until Christensen was shown a red card right before the half-time whistle. And from that point onwards, it was all downhill for Frank Lampard and his players.
Chelsea did have a few chances to come back into the game(notably a penalty) but they failed to take any of those opportunities and according to Gary Neville it was the tactics from their manager which helped Liverpool remain the superior side on the pitch.
“The word I would describe Liverpool as is superior today,” he said on his podcast, as quoted by Football London. “I felt that the mentality of the Liverpool performance was better.
“It felt like Chelsea had to change the way they play and their principles to compete.
“When you change the way you play it’s an acceptance that you are not good enough. You are telling your players. Sometimes players buy into it but if it goes wrong, it can damage them a little bit.
“I’m not saying Frank was wrong, he was trying to do it a different way. They were really passive and it’s a performance that wouldn’t have been allowed in a stadium full of fans.
“Frank has certainly got a harder job this year. It’s a dream scenario having that much money pumped into the club but the disruption with the pre-season and the impact of coronavirus, it makes it tough.
“He has got four players missing. There are four or five players who will come into that starting eleven and it’ll make a big difference because the bugs of last season are still there.”
Chelsea were evenly pitched against Liverpool until that red card incident and if they had all the 11 players on the pitch then we are pretty confident that they would have been able to make something out of this game.
So while we do agree to a certain extent with Neville but the biggest reason for Chelsea losing to Liverpool was the fact that they went down to 10 men and not a lot of teams in Europe can survive an entire 45 minutes with a man down against Liverpool.
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