Chelsea get springboard to rejoin elite as huge summer lies ahead | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca silences critics with Conference League triumph, but knows fans will quickly demand further signs of progress

As Chelsea’s players celebrated their Conference League triumph and the travelling fans sang with restored accuracy about having “won it all”, the message from Enzo Maresca was clear: this is just the start.

And, of course, it will have to. Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital did not buy Chelsea to win the Conference League, nor is it why they hired Maresca or why he took the job.

Certainly, none of the bright young things recruited at enormous expense over the last three years were bought with this as their forecast ceiling, nor did they each sign unprecedented long-term contracts thinking this would be as good as it got.

But it is where Chelsea are right now and, having already ensured it is not where they will be next season, this was a night to be enjoyed for what it was. Even for Chelsea, no silverware comes easy, whatever their run in this competition and a 4-1 final scoreline - harsh on Real Betis - might suggest.

Maybe it was the message sent by Maresca, leaving his captain Reece James on the bench for a major European final. Maybe it was the fact that in securing a top-four finish, the primary business of the season had already been done.

Or maybe it was because, of the hundred or so fans queuing to have their photo taken with the trophy in the early afternoon, all but a handful were dressed in white and green.

Everywhere you looked in Wroclaw there were signs that this was a markedly bigger game for Betis than for Chelsea, their first-ever European final against a club that won the Champions League only four years ago.

Nowhere was it more blatant than in the opening 45 minutes, when Betis led 1-0. But Chelsea have shown little regard for fairytales in the past week, mercilessly dispatching Nottingham Forest when just about every neutral would have liked to see the two-time European Cup winners reach the Champions League instead.

Here again, Chelsea killed any sense of romance like a honeymoon suite fart, with Cole Palmer as trumper-in-chief. Palmer produced his best performance in months when it mattered most, conjuring sensational assists for Enzo Fernandez and Nicolas Jackson in a five-minute spell that effectively won the cup. Goals from substitute Jadon Sancho and Moises Caicedo were cruel on Betis, but the damage was done.

It was a gutsy call from Chelsea’s hierarchy to pluck Maresca from the Championship last summer and hand him the keys to a billion-pound squad. It has not always been straightforward and Maresca has not always felt unconditional love.

This is a team, remember, that was booed off at home after reaching the semi-finals of this competition. The critics have clearly irked the Italian at times; after securing Champions League qualification on Sunday, his first act was to tell them to “eff off”.

Belief in Maresca from above, though, has never wavered. He has never felt subject to the same existential pressure as so many of his predecessors, under this ownership and the last.

The word before the run-in was that Maresca would be given time and a second season, however the final weeks of his first panned out. In the end, they could not have gone better.

Maresca silences critics

Perhaps the best way to sum up Chelsea’s achievement over the last six weeks is to say they succeeded in turning a season of two contrasting halves into one of unequal thirds.

After another tumultuous summer, headlined by the exile of the now infamous “bomb squad”, the signing of yet more wingers and middling pre-season returns, it was a surprise quite how quickly Maresca’s Chelsea clicked, producing results even as the manager himself was clearly still figuring out his best team.

In their opening 16 Premier League matches, the Blues lost only twice, to Liverpool and Manchester City. A haul of 34 points was just three fewer at that stage than the eventual champions.

In the next 16, though, they won only five times, all at home to sides who would finish in the bottom seven. A total of 20 points through that period was three fewer than Everton and six behind Wolves.

First of many? Enzo Maresca has delivered a major trophy in his first season in charge at Chelsea

Chelsea FC via Getty Images

Which is why, heading into the run-in, faith in Chelsea’s Champions League prospects had dipped. Had they carried on in a similar vein they may well have dropped out of the European places entirely.

Yet Maresca’s men rose to the challenge, winning five of their last six matches. Under pressure on the final day, they proved their mettle as Forest, Newcastle and Aston Villa all faltered. There was, in the end, no fluke about it at all.

Go back to that fine run through the autumn and it looked unlikely that resilience was the quality that would be needed to get over the line. Chelsea were a watchable, free-flowing side, outgunning opponents and inspired by Palmer, who was then rivalling Mohamed Salah as the best player in the land.

Wins at home to Brighton and away at Tottenham encapsulated the dynamic: Palmer scored all four goals in a 4-2 victory against the former, then two penalties in a 4-3 comeback against Spurs, with Chelsea’s firepower making up for defensive lapses in both games.

Palmer, though, was not alone. Jackson had come on plenty, Wesley Fofana and Levi Colwill made a promising centre-back partnership and, for the first time, Caicedo, Fernandez and Romeo Lavia, a-quarter-of-a-billion pounds worth of midfield talent, were all fit and playing well at once.

Then things went south. Fofana and Lavia got injured, disrupting Chelsea’s spine. Palmer stopped scoring, as did Jackson, before the Senegalese and Marc Guiu were both injured on deadline day, leaving Maresca without a centre-forward for two months.

If the luck was bad then so, too, was the planning. Chelsea had failed to sign another striker last summer, relied too heavily on an iffy goalkeeper and players prone to injury, and surrendered their super-strength - unrivalled squad depth - by allowing too many loanees out in January.

With their gutsy performances over the past six weeks, Chelsea’s immediate future has been put on a smoother course

‘Marescaball’ appeared to have gone stale, the coach shunning “basketball”-style games in favour of a more controlled approach that blunted his attack while doing little to eradicate the individual errors that undermined what was otherwise a solid defence.

The fans who had sung ‘we’ve got our Chelsea back’ during the 5-1 rout of Southampton in early December flipped, infuriated by Maresca’s attitude towards the domestic cup competitions and the ceiling he had supposedly put on his players by talking down their title chances.

By the return meeting with the Saints at the end of February, the air was thick with discontent, a small but noisy protest outside Stamford Bridge railing against the club’s ownership.

Early in the New Year, Maresca had called a meeting of all Cobham staff, from his players through to groundskeepers and chefs, to stress the Champions League as their aim. Between that summit and going in 1-0 down at half-time at Craven Cottage on April 20, though, they looked increasingly likely to fall short.

The comeback forged by late Tyrique George and Pedro Neto goals on the Thames was the turning point. Had Chelsea lost that day they would have finished the weekend in seventh with five games to play, three points behind fifth-placed Forest. Given some fans had heckled Maresca, calling him a ‘w****r’, as he passed the away end at the interval, who knows how toxic things might have got at full-time.

That is alternative, hypothetical history. With their gutsy performances over the past six weeks, Chelsea’s immediate future has been put on a smoother course.

Big summer ahead

That future, in fact, comes a little more immediately than Maresca would ideally like.

The Club World Cup starts in a fortnight and a squad that has played 57 matches already this season - plus internationals - could yet have another seven stretching into the middle of July in North American heat.

Only last week, Maresca voiced his concerns about player welfare, fearing how overload injuries could impact his team next term, and admitted his pre-season plans are in the lurch, not knowing how deep into the tournament Chelsea might go.

Closing the gap to the likes of Liverpool and Arsenal would be a challenge enough off level weights, never mind with a handicap of sorts: those teams will watch the Club World Cup from their sun loungers (or more likely, won’t at all).

Strengthening Maresca’s squad, then, will be vital, particularly as the Italian will not be able to rely on the wholesale rotation policy used to navigate the European group stage this term once his side are back in the Champions League.

Summer signing: Estevao Willian will join Chelsea from Palmeiras after the upcoming Club World Cup

REUTERS

Youngsters Willian Estevao and Kendry Paez will join from South America, but Chelsea want a striker and left winger to bolster their attack now, as well as a new centre-back and, once the numerous internal options have been assessed, perhaps a goalkeeper, too.

Benjamin Sesko, Liam Delap, Hugo Ekitike and Viktor Gyokeres have all been linked, while January target Alejandro Garnacho is free to leave Manchester United. Chelsea could go back in for Marc Guehi after missing out on Dean Huijsen.

No stars are forecast to be sold, but Christopher Nkunku, Trevoh Chalobah and Sancho all have uncertain futures for one reason or another. There is major work to be done in the outgoings department, with Kepa Arrizabalaga, Ben Chilwell, Axel Disasi, Carney Chukwuemeka, Raheem Sterling, Armando Broja and Joao Felix among those due back from loans.

Whatever money is spent, Chelsea also expect a strong degree of uplift from within. Maresca has lauded his side’s success in spite of their inexperience, rather ignoring the fact the club have bought young by design and at enormous expense. But he is right to be confident that the youngest team in Premier League history will grow for their journey this term.

What then, would success next season look like? More of the same - a trophy and a top-four finish - would certainly do the trick on paper.

The trouble is that until the last week, however much Maresca protests to the contrary, this season could still have gone either way. Chelsea fans will want signs of further progress much sooner than next May.

The football in the second half of the season has not lived up to the first. Grievances have been parked in the run-in and Maresca fair in not only assessing the last six games as de-facto cup finals but treating them as such tactically as well.

Transfer target: Chelsea need to bolster their attack and want to sign Ipswich striker Liam Delap

Getty Images

The approach has delivered results at the time of the year when they are all that matters, but Stamford Bridge will want a return to entertainment when the new season begins.

The Bridge is itself an issue of longer-term contention as Chelsea’s owners continue to puzzle over options for a much-needed stadium revamp.

So, too, is the question of the ownership itself, amid running speculation that eventually one of Boehly and Clearlake Capital will have to buy the other out.

For now, though, both the BlueCo and Maresca iterations of Chelsea have their first big wins, the first silverware of the post-Roman Abramovich era and a place back among Europe’s elite.