First-team defender claims ‘scraping’ points has become ‘mentally draining’ for Chelsea

Andreas Christensen: Scraping for points mentally draining for Chelsea

Andreas Christensen has expressed that Chelsea will benefit from the hard-fought victories they have been subjected to in recent games. His team won the last four matches with a one-goal difference, with some of them being decided by a late winner.

The Blues have certainly become a different team from what they were in the early stages of the current season. They used to dominate opponents while shutting them out for large phases of the game. That has changed in recent months but it could be down to our injury and Covid-19 crisis during this season. Nevertheless, the 25-year-old believes that these closely contested fixtures help the team in the end.

Speaking to the club’s media (h/t Chelsea official website), Christensen has mentioned that scraping to get wins would force them to be at their best every single match. He added that the current situation makes the players always be on top of their game.

“At the moment we’re fighting, we’re scraping points, and sometimes you need that. We prepare well game to game, it’s a little bit mentally draining, but we recover as quickly as possible. Everyone has their heads on right. We are still in every tournament possible so there are a lot of games. I think we’re doing a good job.”

Fair opinion?

The Dane’s words do make sense because it keeps the team on their toes. But, this should not be the case moving forward if we have the ambition to challenge for titles. And Christensen himself says that it is mentally draining, and of course, such an approach isn’t plausible to undertake in the long term.

We were simply much better in the beginning, having dominated our opponents constantly. That eventually helped us to compete for the Premier League title, but we have dropped off quite a lot since then.

In that perspective, the Blues centre-back is wrong about what he has expressed in this case. The fact that we are struggling to beat off opposition who are inferior cannot certainly be good. Even if there are some positives, the negatives clearly outweigh them in the end.

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In fact, in the last 8 games for us in all competitions, we have only one match with a goal difference of more than 1. That number is at 5 for Manchester City, and 7 for Liverpool- two of our direct competitors this season. That certainly has to change because we cannot expect lady luck to always be on our side.

Let’s hope to see a change in the next few weeks if we hope to win silverware this season. Only time will tell how our current campaign will turn out in the coming months.