Juventus 1 Chelsea 0: Chiesa scores 10 SECONDS after break as poor Blues can’t find way past Bonucci and Co

THE PROFESSOR still has a bit to learn after another tactical cock up by Thomas Tuchel.

Chelsea were brought down to earth for the second game in a row by one of Europe’s big guns.

On Saturday it was Premier League champions Manchester City and last night ailing Italian giants Juventus who are currently trading merely on tradition in tenth place of Serie A.

Just like last weekend, there was only one shot in it but yet again it was Chelsea’s dismally flat performance that stood out most.

Romelu Lukaku was deathly quiet and failed to get fired up by the taunting of the Turin crowd for his previous history with bitter rivals Inter Milan.

And Chelsea boss Tuchel, considered a thinking man’s manager, was forced to take the unusual step of ripping up his game plan and making a triple substitution to try to inject some life into his players as the game slipped away from him.

It was the only way the defending European champions were going to get a hat-trick.

At the weekend, Tuchel tinkered with his team and tried his luck by pairing Lukaku and the struggling Timo Werner together up front.

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The twin strike force failed to produce a single shot on target all game and the plan has gone as quickly as it arrived.

Last night he went back to the usual with Lukaku saddled in between widemen Kai Havertz and Hakim Ziyech in the hope it would restart the supply line of assists.

But after an optimistic start and a speculative shot from the £97.5 million Belgian, Chelsea flatlined again and by the end of the night were lucky to get out of Italy with just a one goal losing margin.

It’s not crisis time for Tuchel, UEFA’S coach of the year. He has won the Champions League just a few months after taking over at Stamford Bridge and his team is feared throughout the Continent.

But he needs to get to work quickly getting the juices flowing again and restart Lukaku’s trusty feet following his blistering start to life back in England.

Chelsea surrendered top spot in Group H to a Juventus team rebuilding in the wake of megastar Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure.

They will still qualify and this was their toughest game of the six group games. But just like at Manchester United, it also does not take long for pressure to start to mount.

And Mount is an appropriate word in every sense.

Midfielder Mason Mount got to work swiftly building a rapport with new striker Romelu Lukaku only for it to be cut short after barely a month because of a niggling injury.

Filling the gap left by Chelsea’s best all-rounder has proved more difficult than Tuchel thought. 

Tuchel went all Arsene Wenger and plumped for an entirely non-English starting X1 for the first time since taking over the club in January,

But when that plan started falling apart he turned to three young homegrown players in a bid to dig his club out of trouble.

Jorginho, Hakim Ziyech and captain Cesar Azpilicueta came off and Trevoh Chalobah, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek replaced them in a huge shift by the German coach.

Although Juventus are not the force which once held Italian football by a stranglehold, they can still call on a relatively stellar cast with names that still rekindle fresh memories of the summer’s Euro 2020 tournament and Italy’s triumphant campaign.

One of those is Federico Chiesa, the forward who played a starring role in his country’s glorious campaign.

Last summer is peppered with images of him tearing along the flank for the Azzurri, in particular a stunning goal from the left hand edge of the box against Spain in the semi finals which won the goal of the round award.

His strike last night did not enjoy quite the same individual build up to that but it was a finish of equally high quality.

Collecting a slotted through ball from Federico Bernadeschi, he darted towards goal, shadowed by Antonio Rudiger.

It is no easy task shrugging off Chelsea’s aggressive and quick centre half but Chiesa got his left foot under the ball and let rip with a rising shot with his left foot just 11 seconds into the second half.

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Tuchel has a cracking first team and it is a fair bet he will lift another major trophy at the end of this season. But he may now be entering a sticky patch that will test his undoubted abilities.

He turned to Ross Barkley, a flawed English midfielder, with 15 minutes to add more attacking punch to this flyweight performance.

And although Chelsea ended on a positive note with Lukaku shooting just wide and Havertz heading just over, there is some head-scratching to be done to iron out the sudden issue with goalscoring that has sprung up in the past five days.

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