🔗 Share this article

Although The Blues avoided a total demolition of their hopes of ending up in the highest eight places of the Bigger Cup group stage, they performed a precise, surgical strike on their own chances of waltzing straight into the knockout stages. Of course, the silver lining is that in the short one-year history of the new and not-necessarily-improved tournament, securing a place in the top eight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Central Concern: A Monotonous Lack of Consistency

Unfortunately for the club's supporters, the sole predictable element about the Chelsea team is a monotonously predictable inconsistency, which has been much remarked upon following their defeat in Italy. Since apparently rubber-stamping their quality with an impressive beat-down of a European giant, followed by a bad-tempered draw with Arsenal, the team have been stuffed by a Championship side, played out a dull draw at Bournemouth and have now been beaten by a mid-table side from Italy's top flight.

While pundits have been eager to point the finger on a selection policy that appears to see Enzo Maresca rotate his team like a kebab shop’s elephant leg of doner meat, the Chelsea head coach maintains that, injuries and suspensions aside, the nucleus of his first eleven for games against strong opposition is mostly fixed.

“In my view in that game, first XI, we had inside the pitch the majority of the team that featured against Spurs, they play against Barcelona, they played against Wolverhampton, the Gunners,” he stated. “We had eight, nine players that are the ones playing every time for matches of this magnitude. So if you look at the several alterations that we did compared to previous game, it’s different.”

What Comes Next

To have any realistic chance of escaping the additional knockout round, they will have to be victorious in their remaining two matches. First up, they host the unexpected contenders Pafos, before heading back to the continent to face the Serie A champions, Napoli.

“Victories in both are required, if not, we will face the extra round and then progress to the next round,” remarked Maresca, whose following fixture is a game against an Merseyside team whose recent consistency has taken to them to the surprising position of seventh in the domestic league.

Side Stories

Quote of the Day: “You know, it’s actually funny because his greatest wish was me becoming a professional golfer. That was his ultimate ambition. So when I was 10, he forced me to take up golf. So I played golf every week from when I was 10 to 13” – Erling Haaland revealed how, if his father had his preference, he could have been on the golf course rather than scoring goals in the top flight.

Readers' Letters

“Well, no wonder Wolves are in such a sad state. As any regular reader of this email will know, the only effective pre-match protests involve walking from a public house that the supporters planned to be at anyway, to the stadium that they were inevitably going to. Just showing up 10 minutes late? That’s how long it takes fans to get to their seats anyway” – a correspondent.

“I note that a reader not only got Tuesday’s featured letter, but also a mention in another reader's letter. On a night where both clubs from Sheffield again surrendered points after leading, I am wondering: could the city be proving that the frequency of representation in your mailbag is inversely proportional to the success of anything our teams are accomplishing on the field?” – a different supporter.