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CL: Chelsea will bounce back against PSG, says Mourinho

Updated on: 02 April,2014 08:34 AM IST  | 
AFP |

Jose Mourinho has ruled his Chelsea side out of the EPL title race, but he believes they will bounce back from domestic disappointment against Paris Saint-Germain i tonight

CL: Chelsea will bounce back against PSG, says Mourinho

PSG's Zlatan Ibrahimovic (second from left) attends a training session with teammates near Paris. Pic/AFP

Paris: Jose Mourinho has ruled his Chelsea side out of the Premier League title race, but he believes they will bounce back from domestic disappointment against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League tonight.

PSG
PSG's Zlatan Ibrahimovic (second from left) attends a training session with teammates near Paris. Pic/AFP 


The Chelsea manager questioned his players' mentality after a surprise 0-1 loss at Crystal Palace led to them being knocked off top spot in the Premier League by Liverpool.


Mourinho loves to play mind games, but with Manchester City poised to leapfrog the Blues by winning their games in hand, it may be true that Chelsea's best chance of silverware now lies with the Champions League.


And the Portuguese insists that his team will rise to the occasion as they face the Ligue 1 champions-elect at the Parc des Princes in the first leg of their quarter-final tie.

"Paris is the kind of match they feel comfortable to play. A big match, great stadium, opponents with top quality," said Mourinho ahead of the trip to France.

Despite that, he says that the tie is finely poised, with PSG having emerged as a leading continental force in the last two years, spending astronomical sums to attract the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Brazil captain Thiago Silva to France.

"They have some of the best players in the world playing together in the same team, so they are a very powerful team," Mourinho said of a side who lost on away goals to Barcelona at the same stage last season. "They are big, big, big candidates."

PSG's red-hot form
PSG have not lost in 28 home European games and are currently on a club record-breaking run of nine straight wins in all competitions. They are running away with the Ligue 1 title and come into April 13 points clear of nearest challengers Monaco.

They were some way short of their best in Friday's 1-0 win at Nice, but coach Laurent Blanc admits that thoughts were already on Chelsea.

"We can say that the players were already thinking about Chelsea. On Wednesday we will need to do better in the final third," said Blanc, who was a player at Barcelona in the late 1990s when Mourinho was on the staff at the Camp Nou.

"The best preparation (for Chelsea) was to win and, while we didn't play brilliantly against Nice, we got the result. Sometimes there are games like that."

Silva will sport a mask to protect a fractured cheekbone but Gregory van der Wiel is unlikely to play due to a nagging knee problem so Christophe Jallet is set to play at right-back. For Chelsea, Mourinho has said he expects Samuel Eto'o to miss the game because of a hamstring injury and Nemanja Matic is ineligible.

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