Controversial Chelsea defender demands greater effort from team

Marc Cucurella will be suspended for this weekend’s game against his old team, but that didn’t stop him spurting out a pretty bog standard footballer’s quote to the Chelsea media team at training this week about how he and his teammates needed to train hard to try and get better and find the consistency they’re lacking:

“We have a lot of talent but we need to show that every week. It’s not enough to show it one week and then not the next. We need to be more consistent,” the full back said on the club’s official website.

“When you have a good result you are not the best team, and when you lose you are not the worst, so we need to stay together in these bad moments and train hard because we have a very important game next week.”

It’s a nice platitude, but it’s easier said than done. What even is consistency, beyond playing well every single week? Chelsea didn’t lose to Newcastle because of inconsistency, they lost because they played very poorly. If we start actually playing well, the “consistency” will look after itself as a result of that.

Cucurella is a prime example. He has good games and bad games, the definition of inconsistent. But what he needs to focus on is the granular specifics of what makes those bad games bad, nothing less.