Chelsea drew one and lost one of their opening two preseason games. There are just 3 weeks left before the new season starts. New manager Enzo Maresca has his work cut out getting the squad playing his game, and there’s no time to waste.
As Sky Sports pointed out in their feature about the rocky start to the Italian’s reign so far, things couldn’t be tougher for his team to start the season. They face champions Manchester City on the opening day, and things don’t get much easier. In the 10 games to follow that, they’ve got to face Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Newcastle, plus a London Derby against West Ham. According to Sky, only Arsenal have a “marginally” more difficult start to the season.
The positive spin
Perhaps we can flip it around though – in a way, if the first few months are going to be tough regardless, because of the time it will take to adapt to the new style and the new system, perhaps it’s better to get the harder games out of the way while we’ll be struggling anyway.
That way, once we have started to gel, we’ll be into easier games, and we can start picking up points and momentum. We all know that the story of a season is much more to do with how you end it – a strong start and a bad ending always feels worse than the reverse, even if the points at the end are the same. Maresca could get his toughest games out of the way while the team are still figuring things out, then can hope to pick up form and end his first campaign on a high.
That’s the positive spin on it, anyway… the negative would be that a bad start creates a negative spiral of morale which becomes impossible for an inexperienced manager, without any medals to put on the table, to reverse.
