£55m defender names the game that changed his Chelsea career | OneFootball

Marc Cucurella is now an undisputed first choice option for Chelsea and increasingly a leader in a young group.

It’s been a very tough journey to this point for the defender, who joined at the start of a very difficult period for the club in general and also had issues with his own form at the start of his career at Stamford Bridge.

A really nice piece for the Chelsea official website today sees him talk about his path to where he is now, and he notes one particular game from his first season as moment where things began to turn for him:

“I would also say when we played Dortmund and beat them 2-0 in the Champions League at Stamford Bridge. I remember being out of the squad for three or four games before, but then the manager put me in that game and I played very well and the team won. It was a good moment in my career.”

That was a very memorable game, and certainly one that we always will associate with Cucurella. As he says, it came shortly after the nadir of his time at Chelsea, with even Graham Potter, his coach from Brighton, struggling to justify using him before that.

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With the team set up for him to be really aggressive in pressing, we saw the best elements of Cucurella’s game unleashed, and since then the structure of the side has been built more and more to get the best out of him.

It took a while longer for him to find consistency, and there are still large sections of the fanbase yet to be convinced he’s a truly top level left back, but the improvement in his standing since that game has been a steady upwards trend.