Enzo Maresca deserves more credit for Chelsea impact – why he’s being overlooked
Chelsea are arguably the team that offers the greatest opportunity for vacillating between excessive praise and unreasonable reprimands in a season where most teams are on the verge of a crisis.
And they are either plunged into one or avoid it before the next inevitable fall from the path to greatness—admittedly more due to a demand for extreme opinions than anything else.
For a while, Liverpool were excellent at least in terms of their standing in the standings, then dreadful for a while longer, then mediocre, and now awful once more.
At Chelsea, there are frequent calls for Enzo Maresca to be fired after a single game, but there are also good reasons to think that he might be the best person to lead the team on their quest to “dominate English football for the next five to ten years,” as he stated early in his tenure last season.
Despite winning seven of their last nine games across all competitions, they continue to be portrayed as your typical “hard-to-work-out” team.
The only blots on their copybook during that period were a draw with Qarabag following a six-hour flight to Baku and a loss to fourth-place Sunderland, who just claimed a draw and scored two goals against league leaders Arsenal.
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Both of these events resulted in fairly significant increases in Maresca sack pressure.
After Chelsea’s triumphs over Liverpool and Tottenham, the attention turned to how awful those Big Six competitors were, despite the fact that Chelsea had performed really well in both games.
Furthermore, two of Chelsea’s three Premier League losses to Manchester United and then Brighton, following the Blues’ reduction to ten men feel more and more legitimate as a defence as they continue to win games with their full complement, even though we’re programmed to turn up our noses and dispute excuses regardless of what they are.
With Chelsea in third place in the Premier League standings, their best centre-back, Levi Colwill, hasn’t played a game, and their talisman Cole Palmer, the “one” in their one-man squad since joining the team, has only played 235 minutes of football. We’re looking for more mitigation, if we really need it.
We’d push back on Wayne Rooney’s claim that Chelsea’s 93 changes to their starting line-ups this season will create disharmony and “come back to bite them.”
A more likely outcome is that this rotation could pay off later, especially when rival squads competing on multiple fronts start to tire.
Chelsea, with their deep squad and careful management, might just have the edge. After all, they’ve already competed in — and won — the Club World Cup.
Personally, I think this strategic rotation shows real foresight; it’s smart squad management rather than chaos, and it could be what separates them in the title race.
“You can’t question it if they are consistently receiving results, but if they aren’t, questions need to be asked,” Rooney continued.
Wayne, you probably can’t challenge it at that point. Seven out of nine victories. A manager who prioritised their own job security and the near term would have played their full-strength team more frequently, but at the expense of the club’s future success.
With an eye towards this season and the upcoming seasons of what appears to be that “dominance” he predicted, Maresca is giving every young player in his team plenty of opportunities.
We don’t think a single member of that Chelsea team will be dissatisfied with the quantity of football they play, and striking that balance while winning games on a regular basis is quite challenging.
The only player on the team who has played fewer than 350 minutes in all competitions without suffering a serious injury is Marc Guiu, and we imagine that both he and everyone else were taken aback by his 195 minutes.
Reece James has been expertly coached by Maresca, and we are now having trouble finding a Chelsea player who hasn’t progressed under his direction.
Despite being heavily ridiculed when they first arrived at Stamford Bridge, Moises Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez, and Marc Cucurella are now considered to be among the greatest in their positions.
The early indications are positive, but Alejandro Garnacho will be a real test of his abilities to polish a rough diamond. Robert Sanchez is beginning to take on the role.
We hope that this love-in will serve as a reminder to us knee-jerk Berks as much as anyone reading that losing to one or both of those teams, or even to Burnley, does not imply that Chelsea are pants, that Maresca is incapable, or that “what they really need in January is some experience.”
Barcelona and Arsenal are scheduled to play shortly after the international break, following Burnley at Turf Moor in their first game back.
The Chelsea project is proceeding smoothly, and Maresca appears to be the ideal manager to steer them towards success, which might not happen this year but is most likely to happen in the near future.
