Enzo Maresca faces biggest test as he bids to get faltering Chelsea back on course | OneFootball

Blues head coach has questions to answer six weeks into a season of high expectations

Your matchday briefing on Chelsea, featuring team news and expert analysis from Dom Smith

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The 1,840 Chelsea fans who made their way to Lincoln on Tuesday night were belting it out, just as the home crowd will do at Stamford Bridge when Brighton visit on Saturday.

Indeed they have, Chelsea the first club to lift every single domestic trophy plus the Club World Cup (both old and new formats), the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and all three tiers of European competition.

Football speaks in future tense, though, and however questionable their return on nearly £1.5billion spent on 52 players in three years under the Clearlake-Todd Boehly administration, Chelsea are expected to keep progressing.

They headed into this month’s international break with the joint-best defence in the Premier League since early February, but the four games since have exposed weaknesses against teams who play more direct, and the decision not to sign another centre-back after Levi Colwill’s ACL injury is ageing like milk.

Chelsea survived a scare to beat Lincoln 2-1 in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday

Getty Images

It is baffling after such lavish spending how they have ended up with Robert Sanchez in goal and Trevoh Chalobah and Tosin Adarabioyo as starting centre-backs.

A jaunty start to the season has petered out and after winning the Conference League, thrashing Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup final and qualifying for the Champions League, suddenly Chelsea face an uphill battle to improve on last season.

Trouble began when victory at Brentford was denied by an injury-time leveller from a long throw.

What added to the ignominy was that watching on from the bench was set-piece coach Bernardo Cueva, bought out of his Brentford contract by Chelsea for almost £1m.

Chelsea’s response was self-inflicted defeats to Bayern Munich and Manchester United.

Head coach Enzo Maresca called the drop-off “complicated”, but it was easy to draw a more straightforward conclusion: the gap they must bridge is greater than first thought.

Chelsea should be among those keeping the league leaders leashed, sustaining the pressure over the coming eight months.

He is just starting to divide the club’s fanbase on his handling of certain issues and spoke with a similar air of detachment about the training conditions of Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi.

Maresca is starting to divide the Chelsea fanbase on certain issues

Chelsea FC via Getty Images

As contracted players exiled from the first team and training apart, they have it far easier than his 75-year-old fisherman father, he said.

Sterling is earning a cool £325,000 a week to not play; Disasi’s contract runs until 2029. Yet plenty would argue that Maresca has a duty to work with those players every bit as much as Chelsea have to honour their contracts.

Do the players really not have a contribution to make at all?

Perhaps there may be some logic to be found were Maresca not also under fire for playing some players too much.

The Chelsea boss received criticism for telling Joao Pedro he had to start at Brentford after the Brazilian told him he was not 100 per cent fit, and Cole Palmer lasted just 21 minutes at Old Trafford before his groin injury flared up again.

Chelsea have a further five players injured. Maresca believes it is a knock-on from the Club World Cup, a 51-week season and a mere fortnight of pre-season.

All the more reason to be cautious with Palmer and Joao Pedro, who are only useful if they are fit.

Victory at Lincoln was par for the course for the second-stringers, however unconvincing, but the measure of whether Chelsea are kicking on will be in bigger games.

This is Maresca’s first season having to navigate the relentless Sunday-Wednesday-Saturday-Tuesday schedule of Champions League football.

It will test the limits of the squad after its summer of slimming.

Manchester City are reinventing themselves to challenge Liverpool and Arsenal, and Tottenham and Bournemouth also look dangerous.

Chelsea want a better season than last and their defending already appears a major stumbling block.

Brighton visit on Saturday, and the joke is that every Brighton employee is unveiled at Chelsea before too long.

Their strong start makes that game a fine litmus test for whether Chelsea are still on the rails or veering off-course.