Conor Gallagher was heartbroken to see Chelsea’s journey in the Champions League come to an end last night, but he thinks there is hope for the future.
Despite giving it their all at Stamford Bridge, the Blues were defeated by Rodrygo’s second-half double as Real Madrid advanced to the semifinals with a 4-0 overall victory.
Gallagher thinks the Blues showed enough in the second leg to suggest they can end their Premier League campaign with a flourish under Frank Lamaprd, even though it is difficult to accept twice losing 2-0 to the European champions.
He said: “I feel like we played well, we had a lot of chances.
“I think we definitely had more and better chances than they did but football is all about taking your chances and we didn’t do that, which was disappointing.
“Of course, we’re going to be gutted but we played some good stuff.
“The cutting edge in front of goal is basically what wins you games and we haven’t got that at the minute.
“It’s definitely a big improvement over our recent performances but you need to score goals to win games. They did that and we didn’t.
“We pushed players forward and they were able to catch us on the counter a couple of times, which was the risk.
“Everybody will be very disappointed but I think there was a lot of improvement in our football over recent performances. I hope the fans can take that away.”
With Chelsea languishing 11th in the league, Lampard will attempt to lift his troops before they return to action against Brentford next Wednesday.
England international Gallagher, 23, added: “There’s always things to chase. We take one game at a time and we just want to improve as a whole team and win as many games as we can for the rest of the season.
“We’ll take it game by game and hopefully we can build on this performance because I feel like it was positive in a way.”