Malo Gusto defined Enzo Maresca’s poor decision making in a soft performance against Brighton.
Chelsea came away from a Premier League game with a loss for the second game running. Brighton came to Stamford Bridge and overturned a 1-0 deficit, to win the match 1-3.
There are many elements as to what fell apart for Chelsea. It was actually a very dominant 1st half performance from the Blues, as Enzo Fernandez headed home from a fantastic Reece James cross.
For the criticism that Maresca will justifiably get from today’s match, something he got right was the use of his captain.
We saw James overlapping and spending more time on the right, where he was able to get some of his dangerous crosses in the box.
But that’s where things started to turn, as Trevoh Chalobah rightfully got a red card after denying a clear goal scoring opportunity for Brighton.
Enzo Maresca’s response? He brought on Malo Gusto.
Gusto had a chance during this match to fill fans who have doubted him in the past with a bit more confidence. He wasn’t able to do that.
It’s clear this was a very safe change from the Chelsea manager, as instead of the exciting Estevao causing Brighton’s left hand side problems, it was a slow, predictable Gusto that the Blues had in attack.
Multiple times during the match, Chelsea found themselves on the counter-attack.
Only when the ball found the Frenchman’s feet, he’d often play the ball backwards and slow play down again, the audible frustration from the Stamford Bridge crowd told the whole story.
Bringing on Gusto and Benoit Badiashile over his £100 million signings in Jamie Gittens and Alejandro Garnacho, showed Maresca’s intentions as soon as Chelsea went down to 10 men.
From the beginning of the game, his team was set up with no fear.
Dominating Brighton in every area of the pitch, but yet again we’re seeing how scared the Italian is as a manager when he has a setback like the Chalobah red card.
He panicked, he wanted to take the draw over the win even though Brighton were there for the taking on the counter-attack.
There is a big game on Tuesday night against Benfica in the Champions League at Stamford Bridge.
Hopefully Maresca has no setbacks to deal with in that one, and if he does, deal with them much better.
