Enzo Maresca is taking huge risks with two Chelsea players’ health | OneFootball

Chelsea’s team news from tonight’s game brought the 4 changes that Enzo Maresca had promised in his pre-match press conference.

However those changes weren’t necessarily the ones we expected. Trevoh Chalobah came in at at centre back, Enzo Fernandez in midfield, Malo Gusto on the right wing, and Liam Delap up top.

Chelsea’s workhorse pair running in the red

Marc Cucurella playing against LAFC. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

What that means is that Marc Cucurella and Moises Caicedo, Chelsea’s two top players in terms of minutes played last season, are starting once again. Not only did they both top the table for minutes played for Chelsea last season, they also both played 180 minutes each in the post-season international break.

There can’t be many players who have played more top level football than those two in the last year. Yet Maresca has continued to pick them both.

He’s just asking for trouble, in our opinion. We have some sympathy in the case of Cucurella, because he hasn’t got an obvious replacement in the squad at the moment. But that’s on Maresca too to a degree – Ishe Samuels-Smith has been great in the youth teams and could easily have made a couple of starts in this tournament.

As for Caicedo, we’ve got Dario Essugo and Andrey Santos waiting for a chance on the bench. We know that Chelsea want to take this tournament very seriously – but still, if you play them now, where do you leave yourselves in the knockout stages?

Chelsea taking risks with two important players

Both of them could easily have been rested against LAFC and ES Tunis, and started this game plus the knockouts. To us, that’s a far more sensible way of running things.

A team that has been ravaged by persistent long term injuries to the likes of Reece James, Romeo Lavia and so many others in the last few years should know to be more careful with their prize assets.