Man City 2-0 Chelsea
Chelsea 2-0 Servette
While a win is a win, and Chelsea won, Thursday night's performance at Stamford Bridge in the lowest tier of European football left fans befuddled and bewildered, and players much the same.
Apart from an obsession with possession, no one seems to have worked out the bigger picture in the mind of head coach Enzo Maresca. "All of them need time to know better the system," he said. Telling them might be a start!
The 2-0 victory over Servette sets up an interesting second leg in Geneva against the Swiss Cup champions, but based on this performance it's far from certain the Blues will progress in the Europa Conference.
Booed off at half-time when it was 0-0, Maresca shuffled the pack with a triple substitution. He had to. The game was lurching between comedy and farce, with striker Marc Guiu guilty of a bizarre open-goal miss when he took so long to fire into the empty net that Swiss keeper Jeremy Frick had time to get up, dust himself down and jog back into position to make the save.
Guiu was immediately hooked, along with Pedro Neto and Chris Nkunku, who had – eight minutes earlier – scored from the spot after being clumsily felled in the area.
Guiu, the youngest player in the team, was apologetic as he walked back to the dugout, but Maresca just ruffled his hair and laughed. Later the manager said that he'd told the young forward that he probably prefers difficult goals to easy ones. "For me it's normal," said the gaffer. "He's very young. He runs a lot, he presses, and he is going to score for sure."
Another sub, Noni Madueke, added the second goal with a good solo run.
But after last weekend's loss of the first domestic game of the season to four-in-a-row Premier League champions Manchester City, the Blues need to get their act together quickly.
Defeat to City
Chelsea actually performed reasonably well against City, and had a shoal of penalty shouts, a goal chalked off by VAR, and a string of reasonable chances on the break.
But the man the Blues rely on to create magic, Cole Palmer, is still easing himself back into the groove after the summer, and needs match time to regain his influential status in the team.
As a protégé of Pep Guardiola, Maresca had hoped to put one over his old boss, but City are reigning champions for a reason, and when former Blues favourite Mateo Kovacic doubled Erling Haaland's first-half goal with five minutes remaining, last weekend's game was up.
"Our performance was good against the best team in the world," said Maresca, who is saddled with a bewildering 42 footballers in his squad… some of whom he's never seen play.
Several, including Raheem Sterling and Ben seem to be on their way out to slim down the options before the transfer window shuts.
The Blues travel to Wolves on Sunday, where Neto – showing signs of promise with his blistering pace – can expect a boisterous reaction from home fans who once chanted his name.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and unless specifically stated are not necessarily those of Hammersmith & Fulham Council.
