Enzo Maresca’s press conference today saw the Chelsea coach stay positive about the loss to Liverpool. He said the performance was “very good”, and that the “way” his team had lost was at least positive.
“Overall we controlled the game, for the most part of the game we dominated the game,” he claimed.
The Blues certainly put up a fight, but it felt more like Liverpool keeping us at arm’s length than us dominating. The stats showed that we had more possession and more shots, but they doubled our xG 2.07 to 1.04, in part thanks to the penalty.
It really felt like Arne Slot’s patient team had another gear to go to if needed. When we equaliser, they ramped it up and scored right away. Rather than run up the score, as Jurgen Klopp’s team might, they eased off and saved energy.
You can see the Chelsea coach speaking in the clip embedded here:
Maresca’s team doesn’t deliver against top level quality
It’s hard to be too critical of a game that ended up being pretty close, after a strong start to the season. But there remained a big gap between Maresca’s team and Liverpool when it actually came down to it. The Reds put their foot down and cut through Chelsea pretty easily in the end. It was similar to the Man City game – we gave them scares but didn’t look like we would actually really take the game to them, score and see out the game ourselves.
Our best moments were fleeting counter attacks, apart from one solid first half spell where we got close to the Liverpool box and put them on the back foot we didn’t do much. Our best attacker was nullified. We simply don’t agree with the manager that we “controlled very well” the game.
We want to see more in possession against Newcastle next weekend, that’s for sure.