Maresca feels Chelsea 'on the right path' despite not taking 'that step forward' against Arsenal
Today at 12:56 AM
Post-match thoughts from the boss
Chelsea have limped into the international break with an absolute nothingburger of a game against Arsenal, losing our fourth in a row away from home in the league, making it over three months and seven games without a win on our Premier League travels.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about this game is that somehow we're still in fourth and we "only" lost 1-0. If we want to be generous, we can claim that we canceled out the second best team in the league. But we were never really in this game. Marc Cucurella's spilled shot was the only threat we posed on the sanctity of their goal. We may have been without Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson, but many teams have done more with less.
We've seen many comfortable 1-0's in our (yester-)days, and this was about as easy as it gets. José Mourinho once said that winning 1-0 is "one of the easiest things" in football. "You structure your team from the back, you organise your team from the defensive idea, you don't give freedom to your players to express themselves. The dynamic of the team is defensive and what you do is you recover the ball and try to punish the opponent on the counter-attack."
Or in Arsenal's case, you punish the opponent on a set piece. "For me, the biggest difference was the set-piece strategy," said Enzo Maresca after this one. Bernardo Cueva, your thoughts? (Mind you, Robert Sánchez flailing through the air is not a good look, but beyond anything else, that ball "should" have been cleared by the free floater in the front post zone — i.e. Christopher Nkunku. Also, I will never understand not putting players on the posts.)
Incidentally, that Mourinho quote came in the build-up to a match at the Emirates, which would turn out to be a dreadful, scoreless draw. Mikel Arteta started for Arsène Wenger's Gunners and may still have the imprint of Mikel John Obi's boots in his calf. It was Mourinho's first season back at Chelsea, starting a new project with his Little Horses. He would win the league the following year (before it inexplicably all fell apart).
I don't imagine we're anywhere near winning the league anytime soon (and never far from inexplicably falling apart), but Maresca believes we're on the right path.
"What I can say between the first game against Arsenal and today's game, to be honest, I don't see a big difference between us and them. This means we are, for me, since I arrived, I have the feeling we are on the right path and we are very close. We need just that step forward to compete in these kind of games. That step comes finishing in the top four, top five, Champions League spot."
-Enzo Maresca; source: Football.London
Never mind that step. Let's try beating a team outside the bottom-five, first. Let's start there. (We have 4 wins in 13, against the teams currently 16th, 17th, 19th, and 20th; and we lost to the team in 18th.)
