Mauricio Pochettino says Chelsea couldn’t match Manchester United’s energy despite no European involvement

Mauricio Pochettino says his side poor performance vs Manchester United was due to player’s lack of recovery time from the Brighton match

Mauricio Pochettino appears to have justified his team’s lacklustre play and a 2-1 loss to Manchester United by pointing the finger at his players’ exhaustion and lack of recovery time from the Brighton & Hove Albion match, which saw the club couldn’t match their energy in the game.

The Blues were outclassed by United and looked like a shadow of themselves in the game, as Erik ten Hag capitalised on their poor showing and secured a deserving win.

The home side took the lead in 19 minutes when a Scott McTominay volley landed on the bottom of the right corner. Before that United had a penalty awarded in the ninth minute when Enzo Fernandez looked to have stamped on Antony in the box.

Bruno Fernandes stepped up to take the penalty, but his slow efforts were thwarted by Robert Sanchez. The United miss saw Chelsea cash in when Cole Palmer’s low effort on the bottom of the right corner went past Andre Onana.

The Blues had plenty of chances, but their ineptness in front of the goal cost them the game as McTominay once again rose to the occasion and gave United the lead in the 69^th minute.

Pochettino seemed to have avoided blaming his players and instead defended them, and told Chelsea website:

‘You could see on our bench there were many young players trying to help us. That is not an excuse, but we need to talk with the reality and that is the reality. I am not disappointed because the players gave everything, but maybe we didn’t match the energy. They were a little bit more aggressive than us.

While we are simply competing in the Premier League, United is playing football in Europe, which provides us adequate time to recover from our previous encounter. If we had been playing football in Europe, the situation would have been far worse than it is now.

This is certainly not the reason, because if you’ve watched the match, you will say we looked like kids playing against professional players. They took advantage of our mistakes, and we couldn’t stick two passes properly. It was just not acceptable the way we played, and given we had plenty of chances and we couldn’t score is just frustrating because it will be the reason we won’t progress much.

More Chelsea News

• Mauricio Pochettino reveals that Chelsea star Levi Colwill is not seriously injured
• Mauricio Pochettino causes Chelsea frenzy after failing to recognise Malang Sarr
• Fabrizio Romano reveals Chelsea have approached Corinthians for Gabriel Moscardo

Against Newcastle, they didn’t give us a sniff to play, but against United, we had many chances and we played like scared kids. And when you don’t make use of your chances, you’re bound to regret it later, which we certainly did.