Chelsea earned a hard-fought point at Anfield on Saturday with the Blues playing out a stalemate with Liverpool to put an end to their six-match losing run in the Premier League
Marc Cucurella is confident Chelsea can take a lot of the positives from their hard-fought draw against Liverpool and bring it into this weekend’s FA Cup final with Manchester City.
The Reds hit the Blues quickly at Anfield with Ryan Gravenberch scoring the opening goal of the game but the visitors levelled the match through Enzo Fernandez’s free-kick later in the first half. The 1-1 stalemate brought a welcome end to Chelsea’s six-match losing streak in the Premier League – a period where the Blues’ mentality has been questioned enormously, something Cucurella understands.
“I understand because in the end, the most important thing is the result,” said an honest Cucurella. “It’s true, these last weeks, the results have not been there and we have not shown what we can do.
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“This is football – today we played a good game but it was not enough because we always want to win. Now, we have days to prepare for the game, a final is a final and the most important thing is to win the trophy.”
Saturday afternoon sees Chelsea return to Wembley Stadium to take on Manchester City in the FA Cup final, 20 days on from the Blues beating Leeds United in the semis. For Chelsea, it’s a golden opportunity to salvage something from what, thus far, has been an extremely underwhelming campaign.
However, Calum McFarlane’s side go into the final as huge underdogs with Man City still having an outside shot of clinching a treble this season. Cucurella believes Chelsea will be able to reflect on the draw with Liverpool, where the visitors enjoyed large spells of control on Merseyside, and take plenty of positives to Wembley.
The Spain international said: “I think the reaction from the team was very good after the last performance [3-1 defeat to Nottingham Forest]. Today we showed, again, if we want to fight and we play together then we are a really good team.
“Hopefully, we can grow in confidence after this draw. At some points, we deserved the win, but we need to build on this. We have a massive game next week, so we need to prepare for the game and arrive in the best condition.”
When asked if Chelsea have enough to beat Man City in this weekend’s FA Cup final, Cucurella replied: “Yeah, we have a really good team and we have good players with a lot of quality. We’ve been in a tough moment but we need to stick together. It’s not easy to go 1-0 down inside 10 minutes at Anfield but the reaction of the team was really good. I think we need to take the positives from today and prepare for the game and hopefully we can win this trophy.”
“We need to believe in ourselves,” continued Cucurella. “The team was there, a lot of the players here won two trophies last season, so the quality is there. We need to adjust a few things. We need to prepare well for the game because the teams always perform well in these games.”
While Cucurella was pleased with the performance, there still seemed to be regret that Chelsea did not come out with all three points. McFarlane, speaking to reporters post-match, shared the same sentiment: “This club needs to win games of football, and we haven’t done that today.
“We’re not happy with the form and some of the recent performances. So, yeah, it’s nice to have a good, complete performance. It would have been better with a win, but when you come to these places, it’s really difficult. So, yeah, it’s positive.”
