CHELSEA boss Xabi Alonso said Joao Pedro returned to pre-season “hungry to have a great season” after the forward’s nine-minute hat-trick in a 6-4- friendly win against Australian A-League side Western Sydney Wanderers on Tuesday.
Dastan Satpaev, Dario Essugo and Jamie Gittens scored for the Blues but the hosts led three times, including 4-3 with ten minutes left, before Joao Pedro’s treble turned it around and sealed the victory.
Joao Pedro joined Chelsea from Brighton & Hove Albion in a £60million deal last summer and scored 20 goals in 50 games last season.
But there was disappointment at the end of the campaign after he was left out of Brazil’s squad for the World Cup by former Blues boss Carlo Ancelotti.
It was Alonso’s first game in front of fans after he was appointed this summer. He started a young side in a 4-2-3-1 formation before the more experienced Cole Palmer, Joao Pedro, Estevao and Levi Colwill came on in the second half.
“He’s very hungry, Joao is really, really determined to have a great season,” Alonso said.
“He wants to, after a great last year, where he scored many goals, I think that he wants to keep scoring more and more.
“But we need to help him, as on his own it’s not possible.
“He will have the players around him and they need to have this hunger to score as well. It’s not just about the striker, but every time that we win and our striker scores, I am happy.”
Joao Pedro explained the impact Alonso has had since taking charge.
“He’s a very open coach. We talk a lot. I feel free,” he said.
“When I play in front I move a lot, so he gives that option for me. Sometimes I can play on the left, sometimes in the middle. So that’s what I’ve learned from him.
“I want to achieve the highest level possible with the team.
“I always want to try to score to help my team and hopefully next season can be better than last season.”
Alonso was pleased with the test in Sydney.
“It has been a very useful friendly that we can learn a lot from today,” he said. “There were moments when we were struggling to find solutions, and we needed this. The positive is that we corrected them, but there were moments when the game management is something that we can learn from today.
“When they were pressing so high, it was tough to find the solution from inside, to have a different understanding of what’s happening, and to make those changes in the game.
“It’s something that will happen often in all the games, and the more situations we struggle with and find solutions, the better team we will be. For that, I think that this friendly is going to be useful for the future, and as well for minutes for everyone.”
Sydney-born midfielder Mahdi Nicoll-Jazuli, 16, started for the Blues.
Alonso said: “Really good. He understood very well, what the team needed.
“He’s a very complete player, so for sure it’s a great prospect of player that we have for the future. We need to help him.”
Alonso added: “The conditions, it was tough to get this control.
“Sometimes you need to deal with the games, it’s not easy to get the control, so we’ll learn from that – it was a pretty exciting game.
“For us, a very useful friendly. The Sydney Wanderers, they had a real go. They played really intense, so we’ll get very good things from this friendly.
“We didn’t know really what were they going to do, if they were going to sit deep, or they were going to go aggressive. We had to try and find solutions in half-time.”
Chelsea face London rivals Tottenham Hotspur in Sydney on Saturday before games in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia.
