Before becoming a fully fledged manager, new Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca coached at a few places, including working with Manuel Pellegrini at West Ham.
It was there he came across Robert Snodgrass, who has been speaking to the Daily Record today about the Italian coach:
“What I loved about him at West Ham was he took the time to work with players and improve them. He’ll identify areas in certain players’ game, work on it, make them better and that in turn will help the team. He will educate those lads on a different style, a different process,” Snodgrass explained.
“He’ll go to the very top. We all used to talk about it at West Ham. The players had no doubt he would develop into one of the best coaches around. When I think of what I learned from him, he really opened up my mind. When I first listened to him, I knew straight away he would be a success. His attention to detail when it comes to football is second to none. He’s a student of the game.”
A heartening report
It’s always great to read things like this to get you excited about a new manager. They have to be taken with a pinch of salt of course, but if you can’t get excited at this stage, when can you get excited? It’s tough going to be a cynic 24 hours a day.
There are plenty of very flattering briefs going around right now, with the club obviously explaining their reasons to their chosen journalists. But this one comes direct from the source, and it’s not like Snodgrass is getting anything out of praising an old coach he had.
The real work starts on the training pitch, but at least until then we’ve got some of these nice quotes to get us excited.
