The last result on most people’s minds when Christian Pulisic gave the Blues the lead on 27 minutes was a 5-2 defeat by West Bromwich Albion, but when Thiago Silva was sent off soon after the opener, the tide began to turn, and having restored the Brazilian to the team after two months out and starting with others from his most regularly selected players on the bench, the boss began his thoughts by addressing the team selection.
‘You have to accept that you will never know what would have happened if you choose your team in a different way,’ Tuchel said.
‘It is my responsibility clearly and like my players with this loss, I am very disappointed because we hate to lose, and we went for this selection because we had an excellent training session yesterday and we had the guys on the pitch today who finished this training session yesterday. We had a lot of players yesterday who could not do the full training because of the Wednesday [international] games and the travelling, so I trusted this line-up and I think this line-up was strong enough to win this game.
‘But we were rusty, we were sloppy in the build-up in our own half, we did many unforced errors, we did not adapt our positions well under pressure and we gave away easy ball losses that led on to a red card and that cost us the game today.’
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