Jose Mourinho is adamant he can still write a Chelsea fairytale after closing the club’s European chapter this week.
The Blues bowed out of the Champions League on away goals on Wednesday night as PSG captain Thiago Silva broke Stamford Bridge hearts.
Mourinho can now focus fully on securing his first Premier League title since returning to the capital in the summer of 2013.
Chelsea lead Manchester City by five points going into their fixture with Southampton on Sunday and are out to avoid a hangover from their midweek exit.
Despite a shock FA Cup loss to Bradford and the PSG disappointment, the Special One believes adding the league to their Capital One Cup crown would represent a great season.
He held a 35-minute autopsy of the Champions League disaster with his squad on Thursday and says they are now ready to put that behind them and resume their title race with City.
Mourinho said: “When things don’t finish the way you think, obviously you analyse and you try different things.
“Unshaken. Absolutely. I think the best way to be stronger is to win all the time. You can run from the bad moments, of course, but the best way to do it is to win all the time.
“We have always a lot to learn from matches. You improve with the mistakes. I always react well with setbacks.
“We want to play in the Champions League, the most difficult competition to win. One thing is to be disappointed and one thing is to find the reasons why we didn’t succeed.
“Another thing is to lose belief in your players. These are the same players who have been top of the league since day one. Zero defeats in the Champions League.
“It was an open communication. Nobody afraid to speak. Good opinions. We discussed it and we closed the chapter.
“We analyse matches, winning or losing, but this was not a match. It was a chapter that we want to close. We close the chapter but still have the book to write.
“We have 11 more matches to finish the book and let’s see if the last page of the book is written with the Premier League in our hands.”
Three points against Southampton would be the perfect way to start a fresh page, however Mourinho was keen to stress he won’t be tearing up his team from Wednesday evening.
He added: “If you are expecting us to have a dramatically changed team then no. The changes I make are not to punish somebody that made a mistake.
“There will be two or three changes, maybe four changes maximum. The changes I do is because I rest someone or give someone else a chance.
“We lost a bit of our fluidity and confidence so our numbers in terms of goals we score and situations we create, it is normal that this went down.
“We need to improve and we are going to have time to improve because we will only have one week with three matches.
“Apart from that we have one week between every game. We are not used to having so much time during the season.
“If we go to our last matches we didn’t score a great number of goals. One goal against Burnley, one goal West Ham.
“We are not scoring a lot of goals like the beginning of the season. There are always excuses.
“I have lots of excuses as to why we are only five points ahead - it should be eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.
“But I don’t come with excuses. I have trust in these players. We have 11 matches left.”
