“He has just been terrible lately and it’s costing his team. His ability to finish has diminished at an alarming rate lately and the best place for him now is the bench. It feels like he’s playing for his high wages” – Chelsea Manager Mauricio Pochettino claims that a Chelsea star is an absolute ‘joke’ to his former self

Just before halftime, a deft move by hometown boy Hayden Hackney gave the hosts the lead. Despite having 72% of the possession and 18 shots on goal against Boro’s 6, the west Londoners were undone.

Although Chelsea produced significantly less opportunities in the second half as Middlesbrough tightened up and played outstanding defence, Cole Palmer missed a hat-trick of golden opportunities in the first half.

Chelsea’s season has been marred by a lack of clinicalness in front of goal, and Pochettino was upset that his team could not turn their possession into goals. Nevertheless, he was mainly satisfied with the performance and optimistic that his team would win the match at Stamford Bridge in two weeks.

The Argentine later told Sky Sports, “I think today’s approach was good; we cannot say anything about the attitude.”

The only thing I can think of is that we gave them opportunities to score in the first half due to some mistakes we made, and then, yes, they were extremely tough and aggressive.

They used an extremely deep block, counterattack, and transition play. We had a hard time dismantling this block.

Naturally, that is football—we had numerous opportunities to score and failed to do so. Very disappointing, but this is just the opening 90 minutes of the tie; we still have 90 minutes at Stamford Bridge. I believe that we must have optimism.

When asked what he believes is the cause of Chelsea’s carelessness this season, Pochettino said, “I think it’s how we compete.” We were penalised for the faults we committed. That occurs in football.

All that has to be done is to persevere and be tough. However, I’m unhappy since, in my opinion, if we evaluate the performance, we were the better team because we generated more and obvious opportunities.

However, we failed to score and lacked consistency. After six months, I believe this has happened frequently this season. We lost a lot of games because we weren’t clinical enough.

Sometimes we don’t have the [killer instinct] to score. Not that we aren’t making chances—quite the contrary—but we aren’t scoring them, and in this kind of game, it’s hard to win if you don’t score.

At the end of the match, Thiago Silva went to the away end to try to calm down the jeers from Chelsea’s travelling supporters, who were right to be disappointed, according to Pochettino.

“I did not see, I did not see what was going on there,” he said when questioned about the incident at full time. I’m at a loss for words, other than to say that we recognise our supporters should be frustrated, but we still have ninety minutes to play.