Abject Chelsea squad building leaves Enzo Maresca with limited options for attacking headache | OneFootball

Chelsea’s most regular sources of goals has dried up and Maresca has no obvious way to replace them

Attacking woes: Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson are on long runs without a goal

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You have to go back to January 14 and the depths of winter for the last time Cole Palmer pulled out that trademark shivery celebration to mark a Chelsea goal. It is a month longer since Nicolas Jackson last found the net, albeit a hamstring injury denied him chances for a chunk of that time.

And so, really, the question ahead of Saturday’s lunchtime meeting with Everton ought to be this: has the time come for Maresca to drop one, or both, of his first-choice attacking pair? Except, really, it hasn’t - for a few reasons.

One, is that Maresca has nailed his colours to the mast on this issue, admitting last week that he does not think Chelsea can qualify for the Champions League if Jackson and Palmer do not start scoring, and quick. That is not exactly a great show of faith in the likes of Pedro Neto, Jadon Sancho and Noni Madueke but, on balance, is probably true. Either way, having made that claim, he can hardly reverse course within a week.

Two, is that in Palmer’s case he is simply a player too good to leave out, the kind you sense could click back into gear at any moment and who still forces opposition teams to make accommodations that provide others with space. Each of Chelsea’s five remaining matches are critical to their top-five hopes and he must be given every chance to rediscover his best self.

Enzo Maresca has little option but to hope Cole Palmer returns to form

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Third and most damning, though, is that Maresca has little choice. Having left Christopher Nkunku out of his squad at Fulham for “technical reasons”, the Italian somehow found himself without a single specialist alternative at No9 or No10 on his bench.

How, at a club that has spent more than £1billion on transfers in the past three seasons, can that possibly be the case?

It is an abject failure of squad planning and one for which injuries cannot even really be blamed. Sure, teenager Marc Guiu is sidelined, but he is the only player beyond Jackson who Maresca sees as a serviceable No9 and not to the extent that he has ever been picked to start a Premier League game.

At No10, Chelsea did have Joao Felix as backup to Palmer, but let him join AC Milan on loan in January, six months after paying £45million to sign the Portuguese and handing him a lucrative seven-year deal.

It was a mark of desperation that, in a bid to get them firing, Maresca sent out both Palmer and Jackson for what should have been a dead rubber against Legia Warsaw last week, the first time all season they had started together in a non-Premier League game.

“Using them tonight is to build a little bit the physical condition,” Maresca said after that game. “But also to build mentally a little bit, because they struggle to score in this moment.

“So to give them 45 minutes, one hour, it's also a chance to see if they can score and they can go again. And when they don't score, for sure I'm worried.”

It showed the state of affairs, too, that in both games academy winger George ended up coming on to play centrally, out of position but to greater effect.

If Maresca is considering a change from the outset this weekend - and again, you doubt whether he really can - then the teenager looks the only way he could turn.