Reece James scores comical own goal as Chelsea scrape past Club America

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Reece James scored a calamitous own-goal during Chelsea's friendly win over Club America.

The Blues are over in America on tour and for their first match they faced the Mexico City side at the Allegiant Stadium. Thomas Tuchel's men were 1-0 up when the England international produced a backpass that was hit with too much power and not enough accuracy as it evaded goalkeeper Marcus Bettinelli and trundled in. Footage of the goal has gone viral, with a Liverpool fan account getting hold of the clip and reposting it to social media.

"Reece James doing what Reece James does," read the caption. And the comments underneath were just as ruthless. One wrote: "Could never be my RB." Another wrote: "Trent A66 is a better than Reece no doubt." But there was also backlash to the post.

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One Chelsea fan account tweeted: "U do realise that a liverpool fanpage tweeting about a chelsea preseason game at 5am is like a billion times more embarrassing than united/chelsea/city/whoever fans tweeting about a liverpool preseason game at 1:30pm." One said: "As long as he's doing nonsense in pre season and not in UCL finals I can live with it."

James had gone from hero to villain in Las Vegas, after he helped Timo Werner open the scoring 10 minutes into the second-half with a great cross. Tuchel had changed the entire starting line-up for the second period and James' blunder then levelled the scoring. But then Mason Mount put the London club ahead again with a delightful curled finish into the far corner.

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New arrivals Raheem Sterling and Kalidou Koulibaly did not feature but they will be put in for later games in the pre-season schedule, it is believed.

After the match, Tuchel said: "Normally you start against a lower team where you find your rhythm. You could see that they've already started their season. They showed a physical game that we had to adapt to, I'm happy nobody got injured. It was sometimes on the edge for a friendly game, especially for us. It was OK. We adapted, accepted it and didn't get frustrated."

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