Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger admitted they lacked the quality despite securing a dramatic win over Leeds United on Saturday.
Thanks to Jorginho’s late penalty winner, Chelsea prevented the two-point gap with league leaders Manchester City from growing any bigger.
Mentally, it was also a much-needed positive result after the disappointing defeat and draw against West Ham and Zenit.
Most of the players on their injury list are already back or very close to returning, which is encouraging, but their leaky defence remains a problem for now.
Only Watford (7) have conceded more goals than Chelsea (6) in the league in December. To put it into perspective, they had only conceded five before the start of the month.
Rudiger believes they will have no chance to win trophies if the trend continues.
“In terms of mentality, we matched their [Leeds’] game. In terms of quality, no,” the centre-back said after the game, via Chelsea’s official website.
“Because the goals we conceded were too easy.
“These days we concede a lot of goals which are too easy, and we have to address this.
“If you want to compete for trophies, you should not do that type of mistake.
“We know we need to improve things as quickly as possible.
“We do silly mistakes, we punish ourselves and give away goals. It’s not that the opponents are killing us or outplaying us.”
According to Statsbomb (via FBRef), Chelsea only face 0.19 expected goals per shot on target conceded on average this season, which is the joint-lowest in the league alongside Manchester City.
This suggests that they do not actually allow opponents to create many big chances. So, as Rudiger claims, it might be only a matter of reducing the number of individual mistakes.
Similarly, Thomas Tuchel also argued that he does not feel the need to make any big adjustment amid the lack of clean sheets in recent games.
Receive a digest of our best Chelsea content each week direct to your mailbox
