Chelsea Players Must Be Better Off The Ball – Enzo Maresca

Chelsea manager, Enzo Maresca has come out to react to his team receiving a 4-1 thrashing from Celtic in their second friendly of the pre-season. He recently had his say while speaking to the press, and fans have been reacting.

According to him, Chelsea definitely needs to improve drastically off the ball, even if his players were ten times better than they were against Wrexham with the ball at their feet.

Enzo added that the biggest difference between the Blues and Celtic was the physical condition.

His words, “The result is always important [but] for sure at this moment, we need to analyse the game in general. On the ball, the team was ten times better than we were against Wrexham because we could see the amount of chances we had in the first half and the second half. Off the ball, for sure, we need to improve things. You can see that sometimes we are confused when we need to play short and when we need to play a little bit longer but that is part of the process.

For me, it is important to realise the difference between us and them in the physical conditioning. You can see they had already played four games in pre-season and they are starting their official season very soon. Whereas for us, we struggled a little bit physically.

The biggest difference between us and them was the physical condition. It is very clear they are ready to start [their league season] and we have just had our second [pre-season] game and some of our players have only played 45 minutes so the difference was huge.

For sure we need to improve many things off the ball. As you said, one of the things we did badly today was when the ball was not under pressure, we maintained a high line but when the ball is not under pressure, you need to drop.

We are still confusing some things on the ball and off the ball. It is normal in this moment when we are trying to do something new but game-by-game and training session after training session, we are going to be ready [for the start of the Premier League season].”

WOW.

Chelsea Football Club is an English professional football club based in Fulham, West London. Founded in 1905, they play their home games at Stamford Bridge.

The club competes in the Premier League, the top division of English football. They won their first major honour, the League championship, in 1955. The club won the FA Cup for the first time in 1970, their first European honour, the Cup Winners’ Cup, in 1971, and became the third English club to win the Club World Cup in 2022.

On 7 May 2022, Chelsea confirmed that terms have been agreed for a new ownership group, led by Todd Boehly, Clearlake Capital, Mark Walter and Hansjörg Wyss, to acquire the club. The group was later known as BlueCo.

The UK government approved the £4.25bn takeover, ending Abramovich’s 19-year ownership of the club. Bruce Buck, who served as chairman since 2003, was replaced by Boehly, while long-serving club director and de facto sporting director Marina Granovskaia left, as did Petr Čech from the role of technical and performance advisor.