Maurizio Sarri conducted one-on-one meetings with his Chelsea players as he sought an explanation for a perceived lack of “determination” in their loss to Spurs.

“I talked to them player by player, a meeting of five to 10 minutes with the individuals,” said Sarri, who will rest Eden Hazard against PAOK after the Belgian suffered an ankle injury at the weekend. “I had to think about everything because, on Saturday, we played very badly, a match without determination.

“That’s not normal. We’ve lost one match after three and a half months, 110 days, but we have to understand why, especially from the mental point of view. It’s very difficult for me to understand why we played without determination in such an important match.

“If you don’t have determination, you have no motivation. If you have no motivation, maybe you don’t have clear targets in your mind. I wanted to understand this. The problem was also with the approach to the match in the previous three matches [against Crystal Palace, BATE Borisov and Everton], but if you go on to the pitch with that approach and the opponents are very strong, like Tottenham, and determined like Tottenham were, the problem is bigger. So they were able to destroy us in 15 minutes. But I’d seen the same problems also in the matches before.”