Chelsea’s season is off to a rocky start, but there are many months left to go.
According to the site OnlineCasinos.mt there’s a list of 17 places you can play games online at Maltese casinos, and the Blues are something of a roulette themselves right now.
Some days you land on world class – the 3-0 crushing of PSG in the Club World Cup final was a memorable moment which hopeful fans believed could be the sign that we were back out of the dark ages of our post Roman Abramovich period and into the sunlit uplands of a new era.
But in hindsight, that looks more and more like a one off blip defined by the context rather than a sign that Enzo Maresca’s team had really come together and were ready to take on the Champions League.
It’s not that PSG weren’t trying, but as recent Champions League winners they just didn’t have the same enthusiasm and determination to win the game that a hungry Chelsea group did.
Since then, it’s been tough for Enzo Maresca. His players took a short break then come into the Premier League season pretty undercooked. Injuries – also likely connected to the CWC and the disrupted preseason – have damaged our chances further.
The backing he got in the transfer market started well with the additions of Liam Delap and Joao Pedro – but was then undermined by the failure to sign a defender or goalkeeper, plus the decision to loan out Nicolas Jackson to Bayern Munich.
So there are no shortage of excuses on hand, but still, we don’t see nearly enough improvement in Chelsea’s game compared to a year ago.
Two further windows of heavy spending plus 12 months on the training pitch with Maresca. Are we looking any more dangerous than a year ago? Any more solid in defence? Any more calm and capable of controlling games and seeing out results?
We’d argue no to all 3. The context can excuse bad games and bad runs, but there just hasn’t been enough of a general upward trend for us to get excited about. Maresca is safe until the end of this season – by then we need to see this trend emerging pretty strongly.
When that roulette wheel doesn’t land on world class, it sometimes lands on “absolutely dreadful,” and we’ve been getting some pretty bad spins in recent weeks, with red cards and injuries aplenty. Maresca needs his luck to change, and fast.
