Chelsea were held to a 1-1 draw by Barcelona in the first leg of their UEFA Champions League round-of-16 tie at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday night and while Eden Hazard struggled to hide his disappointment at the result, the Belgian winger remained upbeat about the Blues’ chances of progression.
“I want to say that we should have won the game, but when you play against this kind of team you have to be focused 100 per cent,” Hazard, who started at the tip of the hosts’ 3-4-3 system as false-nine, was quoted as saying by the club website.
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Andreas Christensen’s error allowed the Catalans to score the all-important away goal on the night and Hazard admitted the Premier League outfit were in a far from ideal position after failing to put away the chances that came their way.
“We made one mistake but if we’d scored more goals the mistake doesn’t count, so a draw is a bad result for us because now we have to play in Barca and we know it’s going to be difficult.”
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“We can play with our quality. We have good players, you could see that, so we can create a lot of chances. We will give everything to try to go through,” stressed the twinkle-toed winger.
Willian, after hitting either post once in the first-half, opened the scoring with a fine goal in the second-half to get the Stamford Bridge crowd off their feet and Hazard jested that he told the Brazilian at the interval to avoid hitting the woodwork again.
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“I said to him that he needed to shoot in the goal and not try to touch the post,’ the Belgian said with a grin as he continued, “I said that to him in the first half and you saw in the second half he scored the goal. I’m happy for him, he played really well. He’s a top player and he showed that”.
The last time the Blues travelled to Barcelona, they progressed to the next round by virtue of a 2-2 draw and Hazard stressed that a similar result was not impossible for the West Londoners.
“More than perfect,” the diminutive winger replied, when asked what kind of performance the
“We want to keep a clean sheet, for sure, and we will need to score if we want to go through. We have three weeks to be ready for the game and we will give everything,” the 27-year-old added.