Chelsea play Bournemouth in tonight’s late kick off, shown on Sky Sports. The broadcaster therefore got a full sit down chat with manager Enzo Maresca, where they assessed how the season had gone as it reaches its first natural break, and also asked about his expectations for this season and beyond.
According to the new coach, he’s working from the ground up to build a really strong side:
“In terms of expectations, my expectations is to try and improve the team and build something important,” Maresca said.
“I always said that to improve the team you need to improve the players, to the main focus is on the day by day – how we can improve players. That improves the team, and from there we try to start to build something important for the next 4, 5 6 years, we will see.
It’s a nice angle – there is so much talent at the club, but we’ve not seen the best of most of it. So few of our players are currently living up to their potential, and fixing that would go a long way to fixing our team. We’ve seen the clips of him getting really involved on the training ground, and all the player speak constantly about how intense and involved he is.
You can see the coach speaking in the clip embedded here, with this part coming after 1 minutes:
Diplomatic Maresca careful to not paint himself into a corner
It’s very notable for us that Maresca doesn’t say anything here about winning trophies. He just talks about building something important, without getting too specific. That’s perhaps no surprise – why put more expectations on yourself when others are doing that for you?
But fans want trophies above all, and there’s no point building a good team if it wins nothing – just ask Spurs.