Maresca threatens to sub his midfielder if he doesn’t do this on the ball | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca had a rather spiky press conference today after his Chelsea team squeezed out a 1-0 win over his former team, Leicester.

The Chelsea coach was rather testy after Stamford Bridge had groaned thanks to another first half of utterly dull sideways football. His exaggerated celebrations at full time almost seemed to be aimed at his own fans as much as just a release of joy after a tense finale.

In the press conference afterwards, a journalist noted that some of the dissatisfaction from the fans had come after midfielder Enzo Fernandez opted to pass the ball backwards rather than forwards at a promising moment in attack, rather summing up the crowd’s complaints about their team’s lack of aggression.

Asked if that was “unhelpful”, Maresca agreed:

“Yeah, but the good thing is that Fernandez knows that if he doesn’t play back, I will change him. If the ‘keeper plays long, I will change him. This is what we have.”

This is part threat to his players, and part message to the fans to get used to this.

Enzo keeps his solid line on players doing what they’re told

Filip Jorgensen gets congratulations from Enzo Maresca. (Photo by Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC)

His mention of “changing” Robert Sanchez refers back to his comments from a couple of weeks ago when there were similar fan groans aimed at Filip Jorgensen, who was in goal at that point. In that case, they wanted the goalkeeper to kick long rather than give them heart attacks by nervily playing out from the back.

“My message to Filip was: ‘if you play long ball, I will change you.’ So he was just doing what I told him to,” the Italian coach said at the time.

Well, at least he’s set out his stall. The fans don’t mind boring football if it brings wins and trophies.