Enzo Maresca honeymoon over as wasteful Chelsea come to grinding halt to threaten top-four spot
Share:
For the best part of six months, Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea reign swept through a giddy honeymoon, extending beyond the stage of a debut season at which some of his predecessors had already begun sweating on divorce. No one expected it to last forever, least of all the man himself, but nor can he have forecast that its end would be quite so abrupt. A 1-1 draw at Crystal Palace confirmed that Chelsea are now well and truly in a rut, winless in four and having taken just two points from meetings with Everton, Fulham, Ipswich and now Oliver Glasner’s much-improved Eagles over the festive run.
Newcastle, winners at Tottenham earlier on Saturday, are breathing down Blue necks and the race for the top four is on. Maresca eventually corrected a similar blip during during his ultimately triumphant season at Leicester last season, when the accusation was that rivals had figured out too stubborn and predictable a script.
The Italian could not be accused of that here, tinkering again with half-a-team’s worth of changes, including a surprise first Premier League start for 18-year-old defender Josh Acheampong amid a centre-back injury crisis that may yet take some January transfer activity to resolve.
There are obvious problems here in a team missing two key elements of its spine - Wesley Fofana and Romeo Lavia - and in Maresca’s strange reluctance to make the most of his depth with in-game personel tweaks. The headline flaw, though, is that for a team that did not keep clean sheets with any ease even at its best, the goals have now horribly dried up.
