Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel has offered some simple advice to Romelu Lukaku after his disparaging interview on Italian television this week.
Relations between the player and head coach may have improved since the interview was conducted, they have both admitted to having conversations, but Lukaku’s initial plan to apologise to Inter Milan and its fans for his departure in the summer has spectacularly backfired in the recently-published interview.
Tuchel was asked how Chelsea can get the best out of Lukaku and replied: “Training, training, playing. Training, playing, training, sleeping, eating good, training, playing, sleeping, eat good, drink a lot of water, sleep, train and don’t give interviews.”
The German added: “This is exactly the problem we have out of it because you have a quote from another match in another direction and he says he had a chat with me, and then the suggestion comes and it seems the chat was about how he was not happy how we used him.
“But maybe that was not the chat and we have chats with a lot of players, how we want them to have in position, where they should be when we arrive in certain spaces. This is absolutely a super-normal chat and we have it with Romelu.
“That’s why I don’t need to understand why he did it. It does not make it better, but that is my situation. And I will not enter in finding reasons now to understand the interview, I don’t want to because I don’t have to and I don’t have a reason.
“I don’t go now into chats and think ‘did he mean it the other way?’ We have zero problem and, ok, he gave an interview so maybe he has a problem so he needs to speak up. I don’t have one.”
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