At 3:45 am on January 27th, Beijing time, in the fourth round of the FA Cup, Chelsea will face Aston Villa. Before the game, Blues coach Pochettino attended the press conference and talked about some of the team’s current situation.
About the League Cup final against Liverpool
——We will field a stable and solid team. This will be a difficult opponent and a big challenge for us. It will be great to face Liverpool, it will be difficult but it will also be a good final.
About the team’s injuries
——Nkunku and Gusteau are not able to play tomorrow’s game yet. We need to see how they recover in the next few days.
About Palmer’s influence
- We’re always optimistic when we sign a player and after six or seven months here, he’s doing really well. We’re very pleased with the impact he’s had and when you sign a player you always want him to perform and help the team and he’s doing that and doing what we want.
About Thiago Silva’s future
——I didn’t hear him say anything after the game, and we didn’t talk about next season. Because I don’t know what he said, I don’t know how to talk about it. Only he and the club know if this will be his last season here.
“I think what we’ve been talking about is right now, it’s important for him to stay healthy. He’s doing incredibly well for his age. We are very happy with him and as for what happens in the future, that is his decision.
About signing a striker
——There are too many rumors, and I have nothing to say at the moment. We are working on different things and if something happens we will have a statement. We are not eager to sign players, we are eager to win championships, not to sign players, and I am very satisfied with the current squad. We need to be ready for anything that can happen in the team.
About scoring 6 goals in the last game
——This is football. Scoring can make you win and make all the things that seem bad become better. But we need to be realistic and we won’t change the way we evaluate the team or our plans for the future.
About Chilwell
——I think he is an experienced player, of course, I think the challenge is for him to recover and improve his physical condition. That’s our challenge as well, to help him become a more complete player. Now we are considering whether to start him tomorrow and we are assessing his situation to see if he can cope with another game in three days.
About Vera
- They don’t surprise me, I think Emery is one of the best coaches in the world. The Villa he coached were well organized and they had very good players. Villa’s plan is clear and that’s why they perform well and keep winning.
About Vera’s advantages
——Their way of playing, their playing philosophy and the ability of their players, these are all outstanding. You can feel that their ideas are clear and their performance is stable. They combine experienced players with young players, and their lineup is excellent and the performance is very good.
On what we learned from the defeat to Villa earlier this season
- That was the game we should have won but we didn’t and when Gusteau was sent off Villa gained confidence again. I thought it was a close game and the opponent won because they were more clinical, congratulations to them.
On Chilwell’s battle with injury
——This is not a mental problem. What we have to do now is not only to convince him to trust his body, but also to convince him of the way we work. He has always been very optimistic and he always wants to play, but we need to be careful. .
About entering the League Cup final
——Winning and positive energy always help you gain more momentum, you always need wins to build confidence that you can beat any team and perform the way we want.