Chelsea legend Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has slammed Romelu Lukaku for not looking “bothered” in the defeat to Arsenal on Wednesday.
The Gunners won 4-2 at Stamford Bridge to put them level on points with Tottenham in the race for fourth place, potentially drawing Chelsea – who sit five points clear of the north London pari – back into the fight.
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Lukaku was handed a start having spent weeks watching Kai Havertz lead the line for Thomas Tuchel’s side, but was susbtituted for the German in the second half after another ineffective performance for the Blues.
Hasselbaink was frustrated with the Belgian striker after the game and insists the club-record signing needs to work harder.
Hasselbaink said on Sky Sports: “If you want to be the man, you need to at least run around.
“You have to try and show that you are bothered and that you want to suffer, and he simply does not run around, he does not go into gaps and he doesn’t go into space and without doing that, you are not going to score. Chelsea were very static and if you are going to have players that play like that, you have no chance.”
But it was a poor performance all round by Chelsea, with Malang Sarr and Andreas Christensen failing to step up in the absence of Antonio Rudiger and Thiago Silva.
“I think for Chelsea today it was a bad performance, a really, really bad performance,” Hasselbaink said. “Certain players are getting an opportunity like Lukaku, Sarr, Christensen and when we go back to Lukaku, he does not do enough.”
Tuchel said after the game that it’s “impossible” to win football games when his side makes the mistakes they did at Stamford Bridge.
He said: “It’s a level of mistakes, the number of mistakes in consecutive games here at home, it’s impossible at this kind of level. You don’t see this.
“It’s simply impossible, but we’re doing this at the moment and you cannot win football games like this.
“It’s not about individual players. A defensive performance is a team performance and an offensive performance is a team performance.
“You need to have the tactics right, which is doubtful I had this right, and you need the team selection right, again it’s doubtful I had this right.
“Then it’s a game for the players. They get full praise when they do it, when they did it for the last three matches.
“And they have to face the reality that it’s impossible to win matches if you make this amount of mistakes of this calibre. It’s simply impossible. I don’t see it in any other matches but I see it now in consecutive matches of our games and it has to stop.”
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