German coach Thomas Tuchel commented on his side's 'soft defending' following Chelsea's loss to Southampton at St Mary's in the fifth round of the English Premier League. The Blues fell to a 2-1 defeat despite opening the scoring and did not cover themselves in glory for either Romeo Lavia or Adam Armstrong's strike. The Blues boss said: "Obviously we're not tough enough to win these matches at the moment, away. It was the same story at Leeds. At Leeds, the problem was that we did not score in the first 20-25 minutes, and they pushed us off balance in two minutes with two goals. We could not find any answers. We thought we at least had answered in the first few minutes of the second half.
Today, we scored, so obviously, everything was okay, but one set-piece again. One sloppy defending again. Then we are off balance, and today we did not react to it, we were lucky not to concede a third goal. We were not tough enough as a team to react or push it over the line for us." He went on to add: "Soft, soft, soft defending. What stops that? Pure mentality, stop it by pure mentality. Spot it with defending intelligently. There is no superiority for the opponent, there is no need to give shots away, and there is no need. Just toughen up. As a team, show a different mentality. It's my assessment today; I don't like to talk about it normally because you cannot prove it with data, the body position, or the tactical position in the field. It's like this. Both goals are cheap goals, soft goals, and should not happen if you expect to win a Premier League match on an evening in an away stadium."
"We try to win games and the way we do it is something we need to understand as quickly as possible. I also don't understand why we are in this situation with injuries all over the midfield."