Mason Mount has fired back at Toni Kroos after the midfielder said he didn’t lose sleep before Real Madrid’s Champions League semi-final game with Chelsea.
Thomas Tuchel’s team held Madrid to a 1-1 draw in the first leg but in the return fixture on Wednesday, they sealed a convincing 2-0 win at Stamford Bridge to dump Zidane’s side out of the competition.
And after Chelsea’s 2-0 victory in the second leg, Mount took aim at Kroos over his pre-match comments.
Speaking about the pressure Real Madrid face before their second leg against the blues, Kroos said: ‘In my 15 years of playing football, I’ve never lost sleep.’
In his post-match interview with CBS Sports, Mount said: ‘I saw one of their players say before that he doesn’t lose sleep over individuals. But as a team, they need to lose sleep over us as a team. We give so much, we defend for our lives.
‘You saw that in not many chances that we gave away. We are solid and we need to keep that going.’
In another interiew with BT Sport, Mount hailed Chelsea’s ‘brilliant’ performance against the La Liga giants and believes his team should have won by a bigger margin.
- Courtois sends class message to Chelsea after Madrid’s Champions League exit
- Tuchel tells Chelsea board to sign PSG star this summer
- Ferdinand names ‘best player’ in the world after Man City win over PSG
‘I can’t put it into words, really, at the moment, but it was a great performance tonight, it was a tough, tough game,’ said the midfielder.
‘You know what they’re like, they’re going to come and they’re going to give it everything. I thought we were brilliant, we worked hard. We probably should have had about five.
‘I should have had one about 20 minutes before I scored. The most important thing is that we won tonight. But it’s not over, there’s one more game left.
‘It was 1-0 but it didn’t really matter because if they scored, they’re back in the game and we’re going to extra time. To get that one late on, you can see by the celebrations, it was a massive goal for us and it gave us breathing space in the last five minutes.
‘I thought Kai’s would have been a brilliant goal if that had gone in. A little kiss off the crossbar, I said to Timo: ‘It must have felt like an eternity, it dropping down and him heading it in’.
‘We gave it everything. We had that desire, we wanted to win. You could see in the first half we had a couple of opportunities where we won the ball back and could’ve countered and scored, but we didn’t take them. But we got the one at the end so it doesn’t matter.’
