Why Maresca “fell in love” with his second string players despite bad performance | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca has been criticised a few times this season because of his rotation policy. But in reality, it’s essential that he rotates. He just needs his second string to play well when they’re in the team.

So far this season, they’ve struggled to do that. Tonight was the same story  – the players who started the game were outplayed by League One opposition in the first half, and only won the game having brought on multiple first teamers.

Maresca defends his struggling second string

Chelsea celebrate as a generic group. (Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

But Maresca, as you’d expect, defended his players, insisting that the lack of regular action they get makes it hard for them to perform.

“I just said that these are the kind of games that I fall in love even more with the players, because it’s very, very easy. You cannot imagine how easy it is to slip, to slide, because they are tricky games,” the manager said.

“Every season, there are teams that they lost against League Two or League One teams. You need to pay attention, you need to do the right things. Cardiff is very well organised, off the ball they were very intense, and we expect exactly the game that we face, knowing that Ty [George] is not playing a lot, [Marc] Guiu is not playing a lot, Facu [Buonanotte] is not playing a lot.

“We expected some difficulty in the first half, and then in the second half, with the change, we were quite a lot better.”

In other news…

Enzo Maresca was forced to speak a little about his tensions behind the scenes, and made a pretty amazing claim about his relationship with the sporting directors.

Maresca didn’t have Estevao Willian in his team tonight, but according to the coach it was because the winger has a muscle injury. We won’t see him at the weekend either.