Enzo Maresca on Fofana’s injury and his changes in defeat to Atalanta | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca hopes Wesley Fofana will be able to recover in time for Chelsea’s game against Everton on Saturday after suffering an eye injury in the defeat to Atalanta.

The defender inadvertently caught a boot to the eye and was forced off during the loss in Italy.

“Wes has a problem in his eye,” Blues boss Maresca said. “In this moment, it’s quite bad.

“He’s struggling to see, a little bit, but hopefully he can be available for Saturday.”

Chelsea led through Joao Pedro before goals from Gianluca Scamacca and Charles De Ketelaere saw the Italian side come from behind to win.

Maresca opted to bring off both Trevoh Chalobah and Enzo Fernandez during the game and explaining those decisions, he said: “Both changes are because Trev and Enzo are playing every minute in every game.

“Both of them were not 100%. Also Trev was on a yellow card, so to avoid that.

“This is the reason why we changed them.

“I think tonight, the first 11, we had on the pitch eight or nine players that played against Tottenham, Barcelona, Wolves, Arsenal.

“We had eight or nine players that are playing every time in these kind of games.

“If you see the five changes that we did compared to Bournemouth, it’s different. But if you see on the pitch we had eight or nine players the same against Barcelona, Arsenal, Tottenham, Wolves, these kind of games. We did five changes compared to Bournemouth but the ones that played tonight are the ones playing almost all the games.”

The defeat sees Chelsea drop out of the top eight of the Champions League standings but Maresca is still optimistic his side can get secure automatic qualification for the knockout rounds.

“Probably with two wins and 16 points, you can be in the top eight,” he said.

“For sure, if we want to try to finish top eight, we need to win both otherwise we try to play the play-off and then go to the next round.”