Marc Guiu ready for bigger Chelsea role after opportunistic hat-trick in Shamrock Rovers thrashing
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The Conference League group stage is done and no one is likely to miss it quite as much as Marc Guiu. Chelsea signed off for what will be a near three-month European hiatus with a perfect sixth win in a row, inspired to a 5-1 victory over Shamrock Rovers by an opportunistic first-half hat-trick from the young Spanish forward.
As this phase of the competition has wound down, Guiu has wound up, scoring five times in a week now after his brace in Kazakhstan last Thursday. Throw in one of the eight in the earlier mauling of FC Noah and suddenly the 18-year-old finds himself as the competition’s top scorer. Not bad going for a lad who couldn’t get a start even in Chelsea’s ‘B’ team when it began.
The presence of two fellow 18-year-olds in Chelsea’s lineup here in recently promoted academy graduates Tyrique George and Josh Acheampong served to highlight the accelerated state of the summer signing’s development. While that pair are precocious in talent but boyish in build, Guiu, poached from Barcelona, already looks a man grown and his disruptive presence played a part in some catastrophically bad visiting defending.
The opener came from Renato Veiga’s nothing ball in behind. The chasing George had given up on it, but Darragh Burns and Leon Pohls decided that neither of them could, the former nodding past his confused goalkeeper and leaving Guiu to head gratefully home.
The second was similarly bad, but this time Dan Cleary with the blunder and Guiu with a little more work to do, skipping round Pohls and steering in from a tight angle. The hat-trick goal, at least, was entirely of Chelsea’s own craft, Noni Madueke’s cross finished with a dominant, looping header.
