Antonio Conte will not drop the intensity of his training sessions at Chelsea despite the club’s draining schedule, and has claimed the champions are embroiled in a process of “rebuilding” even though they enjoyed startling success last season.
Chelsea host fourth-placed Watford on Saturday having lost their past two league games to slip nine points off the top. They have dropped eight points at Stamford Bridge this season, two more than over the entirety of the last campaign. Conte has publicly pointed to a lack of alternative options in his squad and, with injuries taking their toll, has only one senior midfielder, Cesc Fàbregas, fully fit following the midweek draw with Roma in the Champions League.
The Italian works his players notoriously hard in training, an approach easily accepted while the team are winning. Yet there have been suggestions over recent weeks that some senior players are growing unhappy that the workload at Cobham, considered key to last season’s success, has not been eased for a team enduring their second sequence of seven games in 23 days of the autumn.
“I don’t know about this,” said Conte, who has had to reduce the number of training sessions because of the more onerous fixture list. “I have my methods. They’re the same as last season when we won the league. Honestly, I think we are working maybe 70% less this season. Maybe for this reason we are having trouble.
“We are playing every three days. When you play every three days it’s impossible to work above all on the physical aspects. On the tactical aspects you have to work less and pay less attention on every detail. But when you have to play four competitions, this is the path you must follow. I repeat: the problem is [having] to play every game with the same players.”
Conte, who made a point of praising the Pozzo family for the team-strengthening they had sanctioned at Watford, had always envisaged a difficult campaign and had stressed in talks with the hierarchy the need to add greater depth to his squad over the summer. “I was a ‘magician’ to anticipate it,” he said. “Honestly, you hope you won’t have problems in your season. But … I repeat, I stay here to work. I stay here to put all myself into this club, for the fans and the players. Me and my staff.
“I’m a person who is not afraid to face the difficulties. My history speaks very clearly on that. I started my career very badly, with my first experience [at Arezzo] and fought against relegation. But I learned a lot from this. I have a lot of experience, as a player and as a coach, of facing this type of situations.”
He would not divulge whether he had spoken to the owner, Roman Abramovich, about the situation – Chelsea last lost three successive league games two years ago, when José Mourinho ended up leaving the champions before Christmas – but will not be seeking assurances on his future. “The ‘support’ is my job, my work – that is my only support,” he added. “To put all myself into the job so that, when I go home, I know that, in every moment, I put everything into my job for this club, the fans, the players. If this is enough, it’s OK. If it’s not enough... [he shrugs].
“This season we are trying to rebuild something at Chelsea. We lost a lot of big players [over the last few years], a lot of big players who wrote the history of this club. This season we changed five players, we bought five players. We are trying to rebuild something important. It’s normal that you have to ‘pay’ something in this situation. Now we are in October and we have to think about improving the present. This is the most important thing. To look at ourselves. Don’t find excuses. Tell always the truth. If you always tell the truth, you can’t be afraid of anything.”