Latest Chelsea mini-crisis unlikely to derail Enzo Maresca's plans
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In the end, it took one of our Irish colleagues to nip in in the final throes of Enzo Maresca’s pre-match press conference and ensure that said match got even a mention. From the outset on Wednesday, the media room at Cobham had been rather more crowded than you might expect for a Conference League dead rubber against Shamrock Rovers, a throwback to the very recent days when on-field matters tended to tell you only part of whatever was going on at Chelsea.
Maresca has been strolling eerily close to Easy Street on that front over the past month or two, football the firm narrative focus and the only mild controversies of his own making in impressive public rebukes of Reece James’s leadership and Noni Madueke’s application.
The Italian, though, will have known that another bump in the road could not be too far off, and not merely because news of Mykhailo Mudryk’s positive drugs test will have reached him sooner than it did the public domain. From his very first press conference, when the Enzo Fernandez racism storm was topic of the day, Maresca has been left under no illusions as to the diplomatic knack required in his post.
A summer squad cull and the exile of senior players demanded steady management inside and out; navigating reports of boardroom tensions between the club’s two largest shareholders did likewise. It is testament to the manager that on his watch, nothing yet has crossed the threshold from background noise to genuine distraction.
