‘Is heart is not at chelsea’ ‘You can’t do this under Jose Mourinho – Wright-Phillips slams Chelsea man after poor play against Liverpool
Shaun Wright-Phillips has criticised Mykhailo Mudryk and his Chelsea teammates for their performance during Wednesday’s 4-1 defeat to Liverpool.
The Blues were overrun by a rampant Liverpool team that scored twice on either side of the break to ensure they remain top of the Premier League table.
Conor Bradley scored once, and provided two assists for Diogo Jota and Dominik Szoboszlai to make it 3-0 to the hosts before Luis Diaz added a fourth just moments after Christopher Nkunku had reduced the deficit to 3-1 for Chelsea.
The result leaves Chelsea in 10th place on the table, 20 points off the Reds, who they’ll meet again in the Carabao Cup final at Wembley later this month.
In his post-match analysis, former Chelsea man, Wright-Phillips slammed Mauricio Pochettino’s players for the manner they approached the game, and particularly singled out Mudryk for his poor defensive showing.
“If you go to Anfield the least you need to do is run,” he told Premier League Productions.
“Liverpool had the ball more, attacked more and somehow managed to run 8km, 9km more than Chelsea who should’ve been chasing the ball around to stop it.
“That really shouldn’t be possible but it’s managed to happen and that just shows you the heart.
“I would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall [in the dressing room] because I know under Mourinho we’ve lost a game 2-1 and the whole dressing room has been turned upside down because he thinks that shouldn’t happen to a team like Chelsea.
“There was an incident, when the ball came across for the goal [scored by Szoboszlai], Mudryk is in there, right inside, and Conor Bradley is there, I know as a winger if I haven’t passed the message to my full-back to let him know that my full-back’s gone, I have to go with him, I can’t leave him because your defender is too far across, it’s literally impossible for him to get.
“All he [Mudryk] has to do is jog halfway and Liverpool think, ‘he might be able to get that so I’m not going to risk that ball, I’m going to keep the ball and try a different route’.
“They just left him [Bradley] wide all the time and Liverpool just kept playing it there.
“They let themselves down, most of all. Most top clubs, most big clubs, especially that by players the calibre they have all know the three-second rule when you lost the ball – try to get it back within three seconds, if you don’t then you fall back into team shape.
“That didn’t happen once in the whole of that 90 minutes, they just dawdled along after they lost the ball, Liverpool just sliced through them.”