New boss Xavi Alonso says he expects Chelsea to be competing for the Premier League title this season.<\/strong><\/p>\n Alonso, who spoke to the media for the first time on Monday following his appointment earlier this month, will take over a Blues side that finished outside the European places last season and endured a difficult campaign that saw the club go through two permanent managers.<\/p>\n Chelsea have not won the league since 2017 but the former Real Madrid coach is confident his new club are good enough to challenge Arsenal and Manchester City.<\/p>\n Alonso said: \u201cTime will tell and we need to make important decisions and strong decisions<\/p>\n \u201cI will not say what will happen in May, but I am optimistic we can have a great season.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to do many right things; how we want to play, approach games wherever we go. That is my job.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to be there (challenging), but we are ambitious and are hungry for success.\u201d<\/p>\n Alonso added that his first impression of the squad is that they are determined to improve on last season\u2019s poor showing.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure and I have felt already that they want to have a good season. After last year, we are starting from zero \u2013 some new faces from the staff, from the manager,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut they are really keen on what we are doing. You see that the energy is good. The excitement is there.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to prepare well, we have time for that. It is really important that we build the right mentality to compete, we build the right basics.\u201d<\/p>\n Get the latest direct to your phone \u2013 follow West London Sport\u2019s WhatsApp channel<\/strong><\/p>\n Follow<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New boss Xavi Alonso says he expects Chelsea to be competing for the Premier League…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"WhatsApp\"\/](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/6\/6b\/WhatsApp.svg\")
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