Chelsea become less reliant on Cole Palmer as team-mates indicate new injury blow will not derail season | OneFootball

Cole Palmer’s injury issues have not derailed Chelsea’s season as Enzo Maresca prepares to be without his best player for longer than expected

No one could have expected the news that came at 9:40am on Friday.

Certainly, Enzo Maresca was taken completely by surprise when opening his phone to a text at 11pm on Wednesday from one of the Chelsea club doctors revealing Cole Palmer’s domestic mishap and the ramifications.

While Palmer remains one of Chelsea’s most important players — in the eyes of many including Maresca, their single most important — his time out of the team this season with that reoccurring groin injury has allowed others to come to the fore and shown that the team are transitioning to a place where they are less reliant on Palmer than they once were.

Palmer’s team-mates have stepped up. Moises Caicedo remains the Premier League’s most reliable tackler and interceptor and has reached new levels this term, with calls that he might just be the division’s finest defensive midfielder having grown legs beyond the Chelsea fanbase and infiltrated the mainstream.

Only six players have scored more Premier League goals than summer signing Joao Pedro’s four, and Reece James and Marc Cucurella have continued to excel at full-back.

Cole Palmer has been sidelined for Chelsea since September

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Increasingly, Enzo Fernandez is playing like the £100million+ player he was signed by Chelsea shortly after winning the 2022 World Cup on the premise of becoming. The teenaged Estevao continues to grow in prominence on what feels an almost weekly basis.

It might well just be a statistical quirk that Chelsea failed to win any of the four matches Palmer appeared in this season, but it is significant that they have won eight of their 11 games without him in all competitions, including statement Premier League victories against Tottenham and defending champions Liverpool.

Palmer has not played for Chelsea since tweaking his groin and needing to be replaced early on in the defeat to Manchester United on September 20.

To the credit of Maresca and his young side, they have plugged the gap Palmer has left behind and have not let his absence derail their season.

Chelsea sit third in the Premier League ahead of their lunchtime trip to Turf Moor, where it will be a surprise if the Blues do not claim all three points.

Cole Palmer has scored twice in four appearances for Chelsea this season

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At his press conference on Friday, Maresca was listening to a nuanced question about how well Chelsea have coped without Palmer when he interrupted the journalist mid-flow, the Italian suspecting the suggestion was going to be that Chelsea might be better without Palmer.

“Absolutely not,” Maresca said in no uncertain terms, half-joking in the curt manner of his interjection.

“I’m very proud,” he explained, “because for us, Cole is like [Erling] Haaland for [Manchester] City, like [Mohamed] Salah for Liverpool, and I guess if Haaland doesn’t play for City or Salah for Liverpool, they are not the same team.

“I'm very proud of the players because, in a difficult moment without Cole, they showed that they are good players and they all want the best for this club.”