“No” – Maresca shoots down weak mindset about Chelsea’s final 3 games | OneFootball

It’s all coming together for Chelsea in a thrilling conclusion to the season.

The Blues face Newcastle on Sunday in what is close to a straight playoff for Champions League football. We’re level on points and goal difference with them. A win swings the odds of a top 5 place massively in our favour, but certainly won’t be easy to come by.

Chelsea’s thrilling final run to decide Champions League fate

Enzo Maresca speaks in pre-Newcastle press conference.

After them we play Manchester United, then close out the season against Nottingham Forest, who are 2 points behind us, meaning they can leapfrog us by beating us on the final day, if they can match our results until then.

Given we play 2 of our 3 direct rivals for the top 5 places, the maths work out that it will probably  be enough to win two games from the final three. But it also might not be enough, and that’s also just the wrong mindset to have. We’ve been thinking for weeks that we’ll need to win out, and that’s probably the right approach.

Maresca Chelsea can only think about 3 wins

Enzo Maresca certainly thinks so, as you can tell from his answer to whether it’s possible that 2 wins from 3 would get his team over the line:

“No, we’re going to try to win the three games that we have,” the Chelsea manager said.

“Now how many points we need to finish? top five, no idea because it depends also on the other results, but we need to be focused on us and try to win the three games. Then if it’s two or one, we don’t know but the focus is to try to win the three games we have.”

As always, thinking about the big picture is pointless – we need to win on Sunday, and then go from there.