Many Of My Players Were Tired Against West Ham – Conte

Antonio Conte has concluded that Chelsea are not in the title race after suffering their fourth Premier League defeat of the season at West Ham United.

“To talk about the title race after a defeat I think is a bit strange,” he said. “Especially as this is the fourth defeat this season in 16 games. When you have this task it is impossible to think that you are in the title race. It is impossible.

“My experience is this, that if you want to stay in the race for the title, in the first part of the season you can lose once, twice [and no more].

“After 16 games if you lose four games it means you never started this race. We started with a defeat in our home game against Burnley. We lost another game. We have a lot of reasons to justify the defeat against Man City because we played after two days.

“But then you lose against Crystal Palace at the bottom and now to lose again against West Ham who at this moment are in a bad position in the table, you can’t lose points in these games.

“It means you are not in the title race. You have to change, to do our best in this season. I said before this season would be very, very tough, very difficult and this is the truth.”
“Today many players were tired,” he said. “It is normal when you play every three days.

“We started our preseason with the same players, a lot are playing almost always, and for sure you have to pay something for this.

“We started badly and conceded this goal and it was difficult to come back. I saw the same game [with West Ham] against Manchester City, where Manchester City attacked for the whole game against the whole team behind the ball.

“But City found a way to score. Instead we created the chances but didn’t take them. Now we are talking about a defeat.

“Our ideas were not so clear and I think above all in the last pass, the final pass we made a lot of mistakes. We created chances to score but we didn’t take them. When you shoot for 19 times in a game it means you attacked, but we can do better.”