I see more and more Chelsea fans seemingly turning back on Enzo Maresca again this week, but one former player is putting his blame elsewhere.
Pat Nevin can often be the voice of reason, and I think his words after Chelsea were defeated 2-1 at home by Sunderland on Saturday, are pretty much bang on.
Enzo Maresca is not immune from criticism, and I have often been the one doing the criticising and still will. I’ll always call it as I see it, and he’s far from perfect. But the fact remains that just like this whole project, he is an inexperienced head coach. That’s just a fact. Everything about this club is inexperienced. The owners never ran a football club before, our head directors never had much experience as being head directors before, the players we have recruited over the last three years have all come in with inexperience, and everyone at the club right now lacks general overall experience. That for me is all just facts. Are they now learning and developing on the job? Yes. Are we maturing as we go? Yes. Are we getting there? Yes, probably, with inconsistencies. But my point has always been why not help the here and now with BALANCE? I’ll keep banging that drum because it should never have been so extreme one way or the other.
Maresca didn’t get what he asked for in the summer in terms of being able to take his squad forward, and Nevin has picked up on that again.
Nevin has exclusively told Sports Mole that it is too premature to talk about dismissing Maresca.
“There’s a number of things he should get cut slack for,” Nevin said. “Number one, you win the Club World Cup, you never get any pre-season. That’s going to affect you.
“Injuries on top of that. Not an excuse, a reason. It’s a young team. They’re going to make mistakes. Particularly the centre-backs. It was sixth and seventh-choice centre-backs they were playing by the end against Liverpool, but they still managed to get through. And this is going to affect them all season.
“He wanted a centre-back who had a bit more experience and never got it. We got another six wingers. Maresca, to be fair, I wasn’t really looking at him. I was looking at more of a holistic view of what the whole club is.
“Is it absolutely perfectly balanced yet? Not quite yet, but is it balanced enough with a fair wind, and not too many injuries, to get top four? Yeah.
“Winning the league? That’s a long shot, especially as the likes of Arsenal look a long way ahead of them in terms of squad size, depth and good balance, and experience.”
Everything he’s said here is spot on, even drawing on our injury issues. That last sentence though, is EVERYTHING.
