What was he ever thinking?
It was a typically infuriating and self-inflicted defeat at Old Trafford for Chelsea last night, extending our winless streak in the league against Manchester United to 12 years. We haven’t been able to beat them on their home ground since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, which would be amusing if it weren’t so frustrating.
Accompanying this particular defeat were a series of baffling decisions from manager Enzo Maresca, who seemed to panic after Robert Sánchez’s headrush of a red card in the fifth minute. First, he threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater (or the literal one in the case of Estêvão), choosing to keep one half-fit attacker on instead without much support, who didn’t make it past 20 minutes. Then, after Casemiro gifted us equality in terms of numbers, he waited until nearly halfway through the second-half to add some attacking impetus back into the squad, only to do so in the form of a full back and the backup to the backup Academy winger who was two feet out the door on Deadline Day. It’s always nice to see minutes for Academy players, but big-money, highly experienced, and well proven at the top level signings Alejandro Garnacho, Jamie Gittens were just sitting there twiddling their thumbs, as was striker Marc Guiu who was called back from his loan specifically to provide cover at the position.
Afterwards, the Chelsea head coach tried to explain his thinking thusly.
“The reason why we change Pedro [Neto] and Estêvão was because they attack with five players, always. And we defend with four, and we can defend with four when we are 11 v 11. But 11 against 10, I think we need to defend all the width — so we decide to go with back five. This is the reason why.
“And then, the other one — Garnacho, he was ready to go inside – but then Wes ask for the change, because he was tired after a long time. So we change and we decide to go for Malo. But the idea was to give Garnacho minutes. [He] was already — I sent him for warmup, and he was ready to go inside. And then Wes ask for change, so we decide to go with Malo.“
None of that makes much sense to me, but I clearly lack the qualifications to understand these sorts of galaxy-brain moves. Taking off one attacker to get your new goalkeeper on I guess is just too simple for modern football. And maybe take off the one attacker who barely passed fit to play after logging 97 minutes just a few days prior, instead of keeping him on to do that job of three? That’s too obviously too obvious.
“Cole, he tried this morning — he had a test this morning to play this game. He was not 100% fit. He made fantastic effort to play this game, but he was not 100%.
“It’s a problem that is already long time for him — his groin. Again, he did this morning a test. He wants to play this game, for the team, to be close. So the effort has been huge from him. And then, after 20 minutes, he start to feel something, so we decide to change him.“
I’d like to chalk this up to inexperience on Maresca’s side, but it’s probably just more of his usual overthinking and overcomplicating things, like with all the inverting silliness. It’s rather unfortunate that we had to go down to 10 players, for example, to get back to the point where Reece James was allowed to put some crosses in. This is nothing against Malo Gusto, who can be useful in certain situations, but he isn’t going to be the one to unlock the consistent excellence that we need from this team to truly challenge for top honors.
Hopefully we can all learn the lessons we need to learn from this game.
Category: General Sports
