LONDON -- Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri has said he needs patience and time to "change the mentality" at the club before he can make his style a success.
Criticism of Sarri's methods intensified after Wednesday's 4-0 thrashing at Bournemouth, with some travelling fans confronting him outside the stadium after the game.
The result -- a fourth Premier League defeat in 10 matches -- saw Chelsea slip to fifth in the table behind Arsenal, but Sarri said he would not be deviated from the plan he is trying to implement.
"I think that my football is about co-operation, so I have to speak to my players and involve them in my football, more than we are doing in the moment," he told a news conference ahead of the home game against bottom-of-the-table Huddersfield.
"Now we have the mentality for doing the match, but we need to improve in the reaction. We need to improve in the offensive phase.
"We have a lot of individual players, so it's not easy to change in four or five months. For example, in the last match I think we built up the action very well in the first half.
"Then, we were able to close spaces ourselves because we stayed too tight with the three offensive players. So it was easy for the defenders to defend.
"Sometimes, we need to stay very high and wide. We have to go inside to receive, not to stay inside. So we need to improve. I need to change completely the mentality because they were used to playing on counter-attacks, so they could drive the ball. Now we have to change."
Sarri said the managers of the Premier League's top three -- Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham -- had all taken longer than a few months to build their teams.
"I want to remember that, in the first season, Tottenham and Liverpool were in the middle of the table," he added.
"The situation in England is very clear. There are three teams above the others. In one, the coach arrived five years ago, in one four years ago, and in the other three years ago.
"They had a plan and were really patient. So we need to change mentality and go on.
"It's very difficult because this team won with another [style of] football. But we can do it, I think. We can improve, we can change mentality, we can play our football."
Asked whether he had been given assurances by Chelsea that he will be given time, Sarri said: "I don't mind, because I am a dreamer. I want to play my football."
The coach's unwillingness to deviate from his favoured 4-3-3 formation has become a cause for frustration among some Chelsea supporters, but the Italian said he would not try a different approach.
"Why?" he said. "First of all, I want to do Plan A very well. I don't want to change some things that, at the moment, don't work very well.
"First of all I want to see my football played very well. Then we can go and change something."