Post-match reaction from the boss
There was a sense of inevitability about it all. From domination to disappointment; we don’t do 1-0 wins around here after all. At least not very often (we have just two this season, against Benfica and Spurs, away).
Chelsea were much the better side in the first half, in just about every phase, but managed to squeeze in just one goal — eventually credited to João Pedro, not that he knew much about it. We would finish the game with nearly twice the xG of the visitors, but Ollie Watkins, coming off the bench in the second half, would finish with twice as many goals as any of our players. Watkins loves scoring at the Bridge but as ever, it’s about taking advantage of opportunities. There’s a reason why Villa have now won 11 in a row in all competitions, and we have now dropped points in four home games after taking a 1-0 lead (Brighton, Sunderland, Arsenal, and now Villa: 11 points dropped).
When that happens once or twice, it can be chalked up to football being football. But when it happens in nearly half of your home Premier League games, four of the nine played so far, to be exact, then it becomes a concerning pattern. (And it’s happened twice away in the Champions League as well, in two of our last three games in that competition, against Qarabag and Atalanta.) And unfortunately, Enzo Maresca appears to have no answers as to why this keeps happening.
“The goal we conceded for sure changed the dynamic of the game. I don’t know if it’s the three changes, but for sure, until the goal we conceded, we were in control. I think by the time we conceded the first goal, we should have scored two or three goals. And then after the goal we conceded, the game completely changed.
“For sure, we have to be clinical because, again, as I said, by the time they scored the goal, I think we should have scored two or three goals and the game is different. But also, it’s probably how we can improve after we concede a goal to manage the game a little bit better, probably, in terms of game after game experience, these kind of things […] it’s something that is not the first time that happened. And when we concede a goal, even if we are winning and we concede a goal, we struggle a little bit with the management of the game.
“And it’s something that for sure we need to improve [but] in this moment it’s difficult to analyse because we need to understand again why when we concede a goal we struggle to manage the game in a better way. Again, it can be experience or it can be that we need to analyse and we need to understand that.”
Surely we have enough data points by now to “analyze and understand” why, no?
Maresca’s in-game changes have often been the subject of scrutiny, and though he was not able to be on the touchline last night due to a suspension, he was still calling the shots from behind the press seats. Villa’s triple-change on the hour mark made the difference; we didn’t react until after the equalizer, and when we did, our changes only seemed to make us worse.
And to add a literal injury and a proverbial insult to all that, Marc Cucurella was apparently complaining of a hamstring and Cole Palmer wasn’t hiding his anger at being taken off. Not something you want to see, in either case.
“[Cucurella] was complaining about hamstring, so we don’t know if it’s an injury now or not. So he asked for the change.”
“[Palmer] was working very good. He was on the ball and off the ball, pressing, he was very good. We have another game now in 48 hours, so he was good and we are happy that he’s back. [I have] no [problem with his reaction to the substitution].”
-Enzo Maresca; source: Football.London
And there’s little time to stew over all this of course, with Bournemouth coming up on Tuesday night. Not exactly festive vibes going into that…
Category: General Sports
