Maresca says it has been ‘almost impossible’ to train in USA heat | OneFootball

Chelsea play ES Tunis on Wednesday in a must not lose game in order for them to advance into the round of 16 of the Club World Cup, but Enzo Maresca admits the heat in the USA is impacting his players.

It is currently between 32-36 degrees celsius in Philadelphia, and Maresca has had to adjust the training routine in order to make it easier for the players to conserve energy.

“It is almost impossible to train or to make a session because of the weather,” he said. “Now we are trying just to save energy for the game. This morning’s session has been very, very, very short. It’s been just about tomorrow’s game, planning for tomorrow, and that’s it. No more than that. As you can see, it’s not easy in these conditions with these temperatures. We are going to try to do our best.”

Expanding on the difficulty of the heat, Maresca said: “I always try to avoid excuses. I always try to be honest. It’s not about excuses, it’s about reality. It’s an excuse when it’s not hot and we say that it’s hot. That is an excuse. But if it’s hot, it’s hot.

“It’s difficult to work with these temperatures but we are here and we trying to do our best and we will try to win tomorrow. Now in terms of the session, it’s impossible to do a normal session, otherwise you don’t save energy for the game. So we did the session this morning, it was quite short, we prepared for the game and tomorrow we will try to do our best to go to the next stage.”

Chelsea know that Flamengo have topped the group regardless of the result tomorrow, and the best they can hope for is second place, which would likely pit them against Bayern Munich in the next round.

But Maresca did not want to look too far ahead: “If we go through, we can talk about Bayern. In case we are able to win and we are going to face Bayern or PSG, it would be very nice.

“But in this moment, the main focus has to be about tomorrow, because football is full of surprises, bad surprises, and we don’t need surprises, we need to be ready, win the game. And then after tomorrow night, we can start to talk about, I don’t know, if Bayern or PSG.”