Maresca explains the crazy facts of Chelsea’s 24 hour flying tour of Kazakhstan | OneFootball

Chelsea’s Twitter page has just published photos of the team boarding a flight for an away game.

It’s not an unusual sight – they do it about once a week. But this is certainly an exceptional flight. It’s not often the Blues fly EIGHT hours for a game – but that’s the Conference League for you.

Kazakhstan is not for the faint hearted in December – it’s going to be deep into the minus temperatures, and understandably the bulk of the first team set to play on Sunday against Brentford aren’t going on the flight.

So how does the logistics of the whole thing work? Enzo Maresca explained it all in his press conference this morning.

“We have a session now, then we fly there, eight hours, then we arrive, have dinner, then bed. Fortunately, they are five hours ahead of us so that means when we wake up tomorrow it is already midday here in England,” the coach explained.

“We are going to be there less than 24 hours. It is more the flight, the temperature, and on Friday we are going to land about 6 o’clock in London and it is already Friday and we have a game on Sunday but we have to play.”

A sample London to Astana trip.

Unusual round trip hope

Hey, maybe it’s boring for you. but we love a little bit of detail about how these things work. 16+ hours travel for 24 hours in Kazakhstan, it’s a wild ride. The coaching staff don’t have to play the game, but they’ll still be as frazzled and scrambled by the journey as the players.

Meanwhile Cole Palmer and his fellow first team regulars will be toasty at home with their feet up playing FIFA!

We just have to pray the disruption doesn’t hurt our superb momentum which is rocketing us up the table right now.