Graham Potter issues emotional plea for patience claiming he ‘wouldn’t have been sacked at Brighton’

At the end of a lengthy and characteristically measured justification for his stay at Chelsea, Graham Potter, who has taken six points from the last 24, picked up a drinks can and gestured at it in frustration. “It’s not like I’m a robot, I just talk to this can all the time,” he exclaimed.

And it was as if in the last four months Chelsea had finally reached him: Carlo Ancelotti, José Mourinho, Antonio Conte, Thomas Tuchel without a doubt supporters.

It also felt good that he was finally being himself instead of the inscrutable version of what he thinks a top-tier coach should be. There was a nudge from the controlled Potter into the Mourinho-Conte specter, and all the better for it.

Potter was irritated by questions about whether his current run of three wins in 11 games would lead to his dismissal. We were finally seeing him show emotion.

“You see me here and this is not me all the time,” he added.

It was noted that he never seems irritated. Not on the touchline. He doesn’t even seem irritated by our questions. At this, Potter offered the hint of rolling his eyes. ‘I hide it well,’ he said deadpan.

‘Of course there are times when you get angry and angry. But my responsibility is to approach you and speak as respectfully as I can, even if some of your questions are stupid…

I have to answer the questions to the best of my ability and with as much respect as possible, because I represent a fantastic football club. I have to come here and represent Chelsea after the game, regardless of the fact that I’m pissed off.

In terms of an outburst, Pep Guardiola walked into the Real Madrid press room and announced live on television that if Mourinho wanted to be the “fucking king of the press conference”, he was welcome. he title ahead of a Champions League semi-final during his Barcelona days.

But Potter was definitely ‘angry’. It was Thursday night and they had just lost 1-0 to Guardiola’s Manchester City and he had a right to be upset. Chelsea are 19 points off the top of the Premier League, 10 points out of the top four and the third-best club in West London, with Fulham and Brentford leading them. Around this time last year they were about to be crowned world club champions. Now they are not even the best club in the London Borough of Hammersmith.

Chelsea’s £70m goalkeeper couldn’t cut a cross within a yard of him, their star forward, who was substituted on 68th minute after starting on the bench, looks like an overpaid, reckless acquisition incapable of 90 minutes of football and the club. The main signing of the summer had left injured after five minutes, followed by his number 10 after 22 minutes.

Bad luck and poor decisions throughout the club are plunging Potter into trouble, much of it none of his business. Owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali are determined to reinvent European soccer, but they risk looking like the Venky brothers with an American accent. Do you remember the Venky in Blackburn? They were the favorite agents and owners of all the selling clubs when they arrived in English football in 2010. It took Blackburn a decade to regain their self-esteem as a club.

What Boehly and Eghbali are dealing with is long-term development. The considerable successes of the Roman Abramovich era are recognized by the new owners. However, running the club with massive losses every season was untenable and adjusting to a more financially transparent model was likely to always be painful. So when Potter was asked on Thursday if he would normally be sacked, especially at Chelsea, after an eight-game win, he shot down the suggestion.

“I don’t think I would have, I certainly wouldn’t have been sacked in Brighton,” he replied. It is a well run football club.

But the Chelsea of ​​yore would surely not have tolerated this, so do you feel lucky to be part of a different regime?

“I would always feel lucky to be at Chelsea as I feel grateful and privileged to be here,” he said. ‘But I understand where you’re coming from, as there is a completely different property than there was. And this is difficult for people to understand, since Chelsea for 20 years has been one thing and now suddenly it is different. They still think about what happened previously for 20 years, which is normal, even though it’s completely different.

“The reason I took the job was because you get the opportunity to shape a club that is in a massive, huge transition period.” Twenty years is a long time to have leadership and then change. With that, he knew that there would be extreme challenges. And it’s not like I’m jumping at the first opportunity to leave Brighton. I had other opportunities to leave. But this was felt to be the right one by the owners, for the support they would give, and it has proven to be the case. They have been fantastic.

Boehly, Eghbali and José Feliciano, often overlooked but a key factor at Chelsea, were in Thursday’s game. His vision is somewhat different. They would have been enthusiastic about Christian Pulisic’s introduction of Carney Chukwuemeka in the 22nd minute and the way the 19-year-old took the lead.

They will have liked the fact that Potter relied on Omari Hutchinson, 19, and Lewis Hall, 18, to chase the game, the former making his senior debut, the latter just his fourth senior appearance. And that Denis Zakaria, a signing that Eghbali promoted despite Tuchel’s reluctance, played so well.

“The owners are billionaires, so they’re pretty smart — smarter than me, for sure,” Potter said. ‘They understand the challenges we have and the direction we want to go. I have been here four months and five or six weeks have been lost for international football. Pep spent a year before they won anything and Mikel [Arteta] and jurgen [Klopp] it took a bit of time. But obviously it’s maybe different for me, for some reason.

But I don’t put a calendar on it. I know the responsibility we have here but I also know that I am capable. I know the quality I have and I have the full support of the owners, players and staff here. There will always be people who will doubt. There will be people in the press room who will doubt it, that’s for sure. i’m certainly not here [in the press room] to convince anyone. I’m here to do my job and then if that convinces, that’s fine.

‘I don’t think I would have left my previous job if I hadn’t thought there was a chance the owners would support me. I think they are absolutely in line with where we are, in line with what we want to do. Now I have more confidence that we can achieve things than when I started at work because I understand the club, the players and I understand what is needed.”

It’s ridiculously early to judge Potter. It’s also wrong to assume that Boehly will sack him just because that’s what we expect from Chelsea. It’s also true that in Pulisic, Raheem Sterling, N’Golo Kante, Mason Mount, Ben Chilwell, Eduoard Mendy, Reece James, Armando Broja, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Wesley Fofana, they have almost a whole team out.

And yet Abramovich’s Chelsea somehow always found a way to win trophies: 21 in 20 years, six in the last six seasons. He loses again to Manchester City today in the FA Cup and this is likely to be a trophyless season.

‘I’m not sitting here like some egomaniac who has all the answers and does everything right. But, at the same time, there are some challenges that we face, there are some margins in the Premier League that are difficult. We’ve had a massive transition, the issues in terms of injuries don’t make it easy to be stable, but it’s kind of blah blah blah, right? People want to see results and [it’s] “Shut up, Graham, what are you talking about? We need to win.”