“We want more goals from the players up front” – Maresca calls out goal-shy attackers | OneFootball

At times this season it’s been Chelsea’s defence who have been suspect, at other times it’s been the goalkeeper. Right now, however, it’s the attack which is struggling.

A long period without Nicolas Jackson leading the line forced manager Enzo Maresca to do his best with a false 9, but today even with the Senegal star back in the second half, along with creative hub Cole Palmer, Chelsea really failed to create anything of note.

As usual, Maresca rather stubbornly refused to accept there was an issue.

“No [it’s not a concern], it will be very important to get some more goals from the ones at front. But again, I think we are third or fourth top scorers in the the Premier League. So I don’t have the feeling that this team need to score more goals. And also when we even when we don’t score like today, we shot more than 20 times.”

“For sure we want more goals from the players up front, even from set pieces in general, we want to score more goals… but [we] create chances every game. Probably we’ve only struggled to create chances in one or two games.”

He’s got a point that scoring goals hasn’t been the issue over the length of the season. But to say we were just unlucky to not score today is being wilfully ignorant. We may have ended up with a number of shots, but we were hardly creating good chances.

Our last goal from a shot inside the box in a league game came against Southampton. We’ve played 4 full games since then.

Maresca has faith in returning Jackson to fire Blues to victory

Nicolas Jackson battle for possession against Tottenham. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)

“But the reason why was also because we play without a nine. If you remember the last four or five games ago, we struggled to create chances, but it’s also normal. Now with Nico back, I think we are creating, but at the same time we are scoring goals and hopefully when you shot more than 20 times, hopefully next time we can score. Sometimes you need two shots and you score. It’s like this.”

Things should certainly improve with Jackson now hopefully fit to start most league games between now and the end of the season, but we can’t count on it. The system itself needs to do more to create them.