Chelsea aim to be bold amid fury of Barcelona’s Nou Camp storm

Antonio Conte may just have been being painfully realistic but his body language at Camp Nou came across as distinctly downbeat. The Chelsea manager’s message was laced with caution on the eve of their return match with La Liga’s champions elect.

He talked up Barcelona’s Andrés Iniesta as a “genius with a football”, reminding all that it would take “a perfect game” to knock out “one of the best teams in the world” and warning his own that they must be “prepared to suffer”. The latter phrase has become his motto over recent weeks and it is anything but sabre-rattling. His team appear to have come to Catalonia braced to weather a storm.

Yet, behind the scenes there has been an acknowledgment that Chelsea must gamble if they are to make the Champions League quarter-finals. Their approach in the second leg with the score at 1-1 is likely to be bolder than Conte’s rhetoric suggested. In the first leg he had asked Eden Hazard to fill in as a false No 9 and asked Willian and Pedro, a former Barça player, to scurry to the Belgian’s support. Chelsea had soaked up the visitors’ possession and prospered on the counterattack.


Source :- theguardian

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