Ruben Loftus-Cheek makes admission over Chelsea’s season and Champions League hopes
Chelsea midfielder Ruben Loftus-Cheek has admitted that pushing all the way in the Champions League is the club’s goal on their road to redemption.
The 27-year-old admitted that there’s hope to better a current 10th position in the PL table, but the UCL will be the players’ top priority despite enduring a substandard season under Graham Potter.
Loftus-Cheek has been one of Potter’s favourites in the Englishman’s brief stint thus far, having started at right wing-back in the Blues’ wins over Leeds United (1-0) and Leicester City (3-1).
Prior to the upturn in form before Leeds, Chelsea had soldiered through just two wins in 15 league matches. But the pair of wins heading into the international break, alongside the statement victory over Bundesliga leaders Borussia Dortmund relieved pressure off Potter.
The Blues are now set to meet Real Madrid for the third time in as many UCL campaigns in the quarter-final stage. And Loftus-Cheek knows Chelsea will have to win it to salvage any form of silverware and book their seat in the top tier of European football.
Acknowledging the gap of 11 points between themselves and fourth-placed Tottenham Hotspur, Loftus-Cheek noted “Well, we’re not going to win the league. We’re out of both cups – the FA Cup and Carabao Cup. Champions League is all we have.”
He continued “I wouldn’t say it’s Champions League or bust, we’ve still got a bit more time in the Premier League to jump up the table. But for us, Champions League is where we’re at. Champions League is where we need to knuckle down and focus and give ourselves the best chance of winning.”
Despite the calls for Potter to be axed, Loftus-Cheek added that the entire team, including himself, backs the manager to turn it around. “We’ve got massive respect for Graham Potter, and we all believe he’s a good manager. We started really well with him, we had a difficult patch, but now we’re starting to play better football. Through that difficult patch we stuck together and were behind him 100 per cent. The way it looked from the outside maybe it didn’t look like that. But from me, and behalf of all the players, we were right behind the manager and believed in the players and the group.”
Recently sacked Julian Nagelsmann, along with the likes of Mauricio Pochettino, Luis Enrique and Zinedine Zidane are all without a managerial role at the moment.
Loftus-Cheek himself could be part of a mass exodus planned by the Chelsea management over the summer, as he enters the final year of his contract after the conclusion of this season. The next few months, therefore, are key to the academy graduate’s Blues career.
It could well come down to Potter making a choice on the same too, as Loftus-Cheek can be deployed in a plethora of roles across the field. The attention for both Potter as well as Loftus-Cheek would be Chelsea’s match-up against Aston Villa on April 1st at Stamford Bridge.
-Akarshak Roy
Twitter: @RoyAkarshak
Photo: Кирилл Венедиктов. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.