By Ryan Benson
Chelsea interim manager Rafa Benitez has confirmed that goalkeeper Petr Cech will be out of action for “two or three weeks”, with Ross Turnbull replacing him in the Blues’ goal.
Cech has only missed 12 Premier League matches since the start of the 2008-09 season, including the shock loss to QPR on Wednesday, but looks set to sit out a few more before the end of January – with the shot-stopper in a race to be fit for the visit of Arsenal on January 20.
Speaking to reporters after the match, Benitez said: “They [the medical staff] say two or three weeks. In this case, I am quite optimistic, but that could be the time.”
Chelsea went into the QPR fixture in good form, winning their previous seven games in all competitions, but Benitez was left bemoaning fatigue following Shaun Wright-Phillips’ second-half winner.
He continued: “We had confidence we could carry on doing well. We changed some players, and you could see some players were a little bit tired.
“They [QPR] were deep, we were not precise with possession, we were not passing the ball with the tempo we were expecting, and at the end we made a mistake and gave them a chance. It was too many things together that were not working for us.
“We cannot carry on with the same players. If you play against a team at the bottom of the table at home, you have to trust your players. The main thing was we were a little bit tired, and you could see we didn’t have the intensity on the ball we were expecting.
“[Mata is] one of the players [in need of a rest]. Two or three players have been playing too many games in the last weeks or months.
“We were trying to manage every game with two or three players and it was going well, but today it didn’t.
“I was not worried about the league table, just about taking one game at a time, and now it’s the same situation.”
The loss leaves Chelsea in fourth spot, 14 points behind table-toppers Manchester United and Benitez admits it will be a tough ask to catch up with Sir Alex Ferguson’s men.
“We have to do everything almost perfectly if we want to reduce the gap,” he admitted. “When you lose a game it is more difficult, but I can’t be thinking about the points gap.
“It’s only about the next game.”
