Manager Mark Hughes has given his reaction to Stoke City’s defeat to Chelsea yesterday.
Hosting Antonio Conte’s side at the Bet365 Stadium for the game, Stoke went down four nil on the day with Alvaro Morata helping himself to a hattrick and the match ball, but for Hughes it was a case of several individual errors costing us heavily across the 90 minutes.
Speaking to the Official Website as he met with the media following the game, Hughes said of our first home defeat.
‘It was a difficult day obviously, we were struggling with personnel beforehand and we ended the day with no senior central defenders available at all. That said, I thought we stuck at it, even though we made the worst possible start by allowing them to score an easy goal so early on from a routine ball over the top.’
Hughes went on to say.
‘You can’t allow yourselves to make too many individual errors in these sort of games, but Fletch allowed the ball to drop a little bit too far away from him and they scored a second which really set us back. At 2-0 we were feeling a little bit aggrieved I think it is fair to say, because for the most part I thought we handled them pretty well and looked a threat at the other end too.’
As for the performance following the half time break, Hughes felt we did do slightly better but then we lost Bruno Martins Indi and it fell apart again.
‘We continued to show our intent in the second half, asked questions of them and pushed them back, but in the end, once Bruno had to come off through injury, we really struggled to cope. The last 10 minutes of the game really went away from us to be perfectly honest, and they scored two quick-fire goals which really flatters them in terms of the margin of victory.’
He ended by saying.
‘All in all, given the circumstances of the personnel we had missing I thought we did OK.’
On the injury front, he went on to say that he had his fingers crossed for some good news in the next few days.
‘Bruno has unfortunately got an issue with his groin, so in terms of centre backs I don’t have a single one available to me. I don’t think I have ever experienced anything like this in my time in the game, but it is what it is and we have to move on and hope that we get Ryan Shawcross and maybe Geoff Cameron back next week; possibly even Kevin Wimmer too.’
Adding.
‘It`s incredible really because when the window closed and I looked at the options I had available to me then we had never been stronger in that position. It`s something we have had to deal with, but it certainly impacted us today, because I really do feel that had we been at full strength this afternoon then we would have run Chelsea very close.’
