Petr is in the lead of the Czech Golden Ball

There were a lot of good games which I'm satisfied with, be it for the national team or Chelsea. Of course not everything went according to plans; mainly the fact that we failed to win the Super Cup, although we really wanted to. We're not dwelling on it though.

Every time there's an unfortunate series like this, especially in top-class teams it brings certain consequences. In order to be able to recover as quickly as possible, they even changed the coach. We're working on our comeback as we speak. You could already notice massive improvement in the last Champions League game where we beat Nordsjaelland 6-1. The same with our game against Sunderland. I think these show that we're slowly getting back on our feet. Our performance in the Club World Cup will play a major part in that, as well. I firmly believe we'll be able to get good results and gain the same kind of confidence we had at the beginning of the season.

That's all a part of a major club. If I were supposed to follow all the rumours I wouldn't have time to do anything else. There are internal matters which we can't affect. We're used to that now. You have to be ready for things like that in teams like Chelsea.

There are games where such players are needed and there are games where they aren't... In any case, it's better when everyone's ready to go and can be used as needed. That wasn't the case with Frank and John. Their absence wasn't the cause of our bad results. The actual reason was our overall performance as a team. Even with both of them playing, there have been games we couldn't win. That's why I daren't use their absence as a justification for our recent failures.

It all depends what kind of repercussions our performance in the Club World Cup will have. We're coming back on Monday, 17 December, and two days after that we're playing a League game in Leeds, followed by another on Sunday. It's going to be a challenging part of the season, when we'll be able to either gain, or lose a lot. One game will be rapidly followed by another, we'll be playing four to five games in a fortnight, so things could take an unexpected turn. As of now we're losing 10 points on the leader, however that might not necessarily be the case after Christmas. If we could get back within reach, that would be ideal.