Chelsea’s unconvincing start to the season continued tonight after the 2021 champions of Europe lost their opening Champions League group stage game 1-0 away at Croatian side Dinamo Zagreb.
Thomas Tuchel’s side pinned the home team back right from the off but as is so often the case with the Blues they lacked that final piece of quality in the final third and Zagreb seemed happy to soak up the pressure and try and hit their opponent on the break.
On 13 minutes Dinamo’s gameplan would work to perfection when they hit on the counter, with Mislav Orsic leaving a leaden-footed Wesley Fofana in his wake and finishing confident past Kepa in the Chelsea goal.
Chelsea thought they had equalised through new signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang just after the break, but VAR stepped in and adjudged Ben Chilwell to have been offside in the build-up.
Soon after and Dinamo sent their Premier League opponents a warning that they remained a threat themselves, with Kepa doing brilliantly to tip a ferocious Stefan Ristovski shot onto the crossbar.
Tuchel emptied his bench in search of that elusive equaliser, but apart from a Reece James effort that hit the post the Stamford Bridge outfit never really looked like scoring and Zagreb held on for a famous and ultimately deserved win.
Speaking afterwards admitted his side had once again been below par.
“It’s an underperformance from us,” Tuchel told BT Sport.
”We have the same story as always. We have an OK start, we don’t finish our half chances, we don’t feel it when the game is already there to put to bed in the first 15/20 minutes.
”Then we concede one counter-attack, which is far too easy, and from there we struggled.”
When asked what his main frustration was the German coach replied:
“Too much to analyse. I’m a part of it. We are clearly not there, where we need to be and where we can be. So it’s on me, it’s on us, we need to find solutions. At the moment, everything is missing.”
