Owen Hargreaves slams Chelsea decision after PSG thrashing: ‘Never going to work’ | Football
Owen Hargreaves tore Chelsea’s recruitment model to shreds after the Blues were dumped out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain.
Liam Rosenior’s side needed a miraculous comeback after losing 5-2 in the first leg in Paris, but instead went further behind when Khvicha Kvaratskhelia scored after just six minutes.
Bradley Barcola doubled the lead on the night just eight minutes later with a superb finish before Senny Mayulu rounded out an 8-2 aggregate win for the Parisiens with a second-half strike off the bench.
Chelsea are the youngest side in this season’s competition, and their inexperience showed across the two legs against the defending champions.
And two-time winner Hargreaves believes the club needs to bring in some much-needed experience to their squad if they are to ever truly contend for major silverware.
‘They already had a culture, this club have won things forever under different managers, different regimes, different players,’ Hargreaves told TNT Sports post-match.
‘And they’ve won the biggest trophies – Premier Leagues, Champions Leagues – not Club World Cups or something smaller.
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‘This club should want to win the biggest trophies. The Premier Leagues and the Champions Leagues. Right now, they’re miles off it.
‘They’ve signed some brilliant young players, but right now they’ve got too many young players.’
He continued: ‘They need experienced players. All these great Chelsea teams have had world class experienced players – John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Makelele, Essien.’
‘It’s great to have these young kids, but you need to have experience. The guys who own this club, and buy these players they have to understand that.
‘You can’t have three academy kids in a back four against the European champions. It’s impossible, it’s never going to work. 8-2 over two legs. It’s too much.’
Reflecting on side’s painful exit, Rosenior added: ‘Six minutes in and another mistake that we make, it takes the wind out of our sails. I think the second goal he’s hit from 25 yards in the top corner.
‘When you go two goals down so early and five goals down on aggregate, it’s a really, really difficult evening.
‘We wanted to obviously put up more of a fight than what we did. Credit to PSG. Their possession play was really, really top in the game and over the two legs they deserve to go through.
‘Two and a quarter games ago, we were away in Paris or coming off the back of Aston Villa, a very good performance. 2-2 in the game, but we don’t take care of the moments, we switch off.
‘What I have to do is make sure that we get that back on track and that comes from not making mistakes or errors.
‘That’s something that me and my staff have already spoken about now, but that’s something that I will speak about tomorrow and make sure that we go into the Everton game in a really positive frame of mind.’
Chelsea will look to get back to winning ways at the weekend when they travel to face Everton in the Premier League.
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Owen Hargreaves slams Chelsea decision after PSG thrashing: ‘Never going to work’ | Football
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