Chelsea drew 1-1 with Inter Milan in a pre-season friendly. After the game, Chelsea’s official website published Maresca’s post-match comments. The coach was pleased with the team’s performance, but also stressed that he hasn’t decided on his starting XI for next week’s opening league game due to the abundance of good players.
“I am happy with the result and the team’s performance, because we can see the team improving in terms of both having and not having the ball”, Maresca spoke about the game: “Today we created 6-7 clear chances again. We only scored one, but it’s important to create chances, we should have scored more. Then, although we conceded a goal because of a small mistake, the team was very proactive in winning the ball back and blocking shots when we didn’t have the ball. You can see that our work is bearing fruit, we’re trying to get our ball control right. Inter Milan is very special in defense, to be sure, the team has done well.”
This was Maresca’s first game at Stamford Bridge as manager, and he was excited about it: “The team will get better and better over time. We started planning a month ago, and now we can clearly see the team progressing. How does it feel to be warmly welcomed by the fans? Very happy, great atmosphere. We need to build this connection between the team and the fans, especially at home, the fans can be our 12th man, hopefully we can bring them joy!”
In this game, Chelsea introduced Pedro Neto, who had transferred from Wolves, to the fans at half-time, Maresca said: “He can provide a lot, can play on the right or the left, very good one-on-one. He will be another option for us, there will be a lot of games this season, we need a bigger squad”.
Chelsea’s current squad is seriously overstaffed, making it difficult for Maresca to choose his starting line-up, to which Maresca said: “We’re trying to let all the players get some game time, we made four changes at half-time, it was to give some minutes to Palmer, Caicedo and players who are recovering from injuries, Jackson also came on, overall, I’m happy with the players’ fitness. We have Fofana, Lavia, Nkunku, they’re all great. We also have players like Gusto, who played three different positions in pre-season, Nkunku too, I think versatility is very important.”
Maresca said he hasn’t decided on his starting line-up for the Premier League opener against Manchester City: “I don’t know my team well enough yet, in pre-season, we went from city to city for a lot of games. Now we finally have a normal week, we have tomorrow off, then we start preparing for the game!”
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