Ian Wright singles out ‘selfish’ Chelsea star after Carabao Cup final defeat to Liverpool | Football | Only Sports And Health

Virgil van Dijk’s extra-time winner sealed the win for Jurgen Klopp’s side at Wembley to add more misery to Chelsea’s first season under Pochettino.

Fernandez had an excellent chance to give Chelsea the lead early in the second half but the midfielder botched his backheeled attempt from six yards out instead of laying it off to Raheem Sterling or Cole Palmer, who were both free and in better shooting positions.

And Wright feels that Fernandez’s decision highlights the current disconnect in Chelsea’s squad.

‘You do look at it and you feel, we spoke about Liverpool and their togetherness, Chelsea you feel the disconnect with the fans, what’s going on upstairs, with the players, now the manager is under pressure, you just feel like there’s no togetherness,’ Wright said on The Kelly & Wrighty Show.

‘You rightly mentioned the backheel from Enzo in the box, in a final, you lay it to someone and they score a tap-in, it’s what a team does, when you’re playing for a team.

‘For him to not do that just shows where they are at the moment, they’re all over the place.

Wright also believes Chelsea supporters will question Pochettino’s ‘very negative’ approach to the second half of the final against Liverpool.

‘Without a shadow of a doubt there’s potential there and we’re thinking that Mauricio Pochettino with his experience and his progression of youth players, what we saw at Tottenham, we thought Chelsea have got a load of players to sort how and him coming might have been the perfect manager to sort that out but it doesn’t seem to have materialised in the way it’s going,’ Wright said.

‘In his press conference afterwards, talking about taking off players when they’re tired in a final, for me if I’m a Chelsea fan, I’d take that as very negative simply because they’re going on about him not winning anything, he doesn’t know what it’s like at that stage of the game to go all out and try to win because he’s not done that before.

‘Unfortunately that’s going to be labelled against him but then what you want, ultimately, those players have to come together for themselves, to be together but it’s up to the manager to get them together.’

Meanwhile, Tim Sherwood, who was a guest on the show with Wright, claims Chelsea’s decision to hand out lengthy contract to new signings has dampened the hunger and desire of the players.

‘We know why they’ve given them long contracts because of Financial Fair Play to spread it over the amount of years,’ Sherwood said.

‘But not one person has given a thought to when you give an eight-year contract to a play on extraordinary amounts of money, what happens then? They get comfortable. They think, ‘don’t put me in the squad because it interferes with my social life, I’m in London, I’m having a good time’.

‘That’s no good, you need them to be hungry all of the time. You see loads of players when they’re in the last year of their contract, they seem to perform better. These have got it too much too early.

‘They shouldn’t have done it, it’s a bad model and they need to realise that.

‘They’ve just taken Sam Jewell in there from Brighton, (Paul) Winstanley is already in there, it looks like they’re buying up that model, they can learn, how Chelsea can learn from Brighton from that model.

‘They need to learn from someone because they’ve got it drastically wrong.’