“No panic” – Stubborn Maresca claims 6th place finish is no disaster for work in progress Chelsea | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca took a really interesting press conference today on the back a draw and two defeats.

After a great start to the season things suddenly have taken a negative turn, and he was asked about his team’s top four chances and how they’ve been affected by a couple of bad results.

The Italian coach was asked about this weekend’s game and how important it was to win it to get things back on track:

“Not only this weekend, the next 19 games. it’s important that we’re going to be there, I said already many times I don’t think one of us in this room expects us to be where we are now at the beginning of the season. That means that the team is doing very well, but now we have the second part ahead of us,” the coach explained.

“We have to continue to do that knowing that we’re going to be first again, we’re going to be hopefully second again, but we can be also fifth or sixth in the table, no panic, it’s just a matter of seeing at the end of the season where we are.”

Failure to reach Champions League will feel like failure, no matter the expectations

Chelsea players fight Ipswich at full time. (Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

Well football is all about expectations, and unfortunately for Maresca he has really raised them with a strong start to the season. If we’d known in the summer that this team was going to finish 6th, that wouldn’t have been a disaster. As Maresca says, it would have pretty much been in line with expectations.

But after a first half of the season which had the Blues within a point of being top at Christmas, ending 6th now will inevitably be a disappointment, no matter what everyone’s preseason predictions were.