London is Blue Dispatch #060

I went into tonight’s game asking myself, what lies in between Chelsea’s first team and the bomb squad? On a pitch that resembled the moon’s surface with all its crevasses, what Chelsea’s intermediate XI served up was an unpalatable, dizzying mess; 75% of the brightest moments in the game came at the fireworks display at the end.

Harsh, but deserved criticism, because this season in particular, rotations like these could be season defining. Today’s game felt like twenty players casually jogging-on in the 67^th minute with the scoreboard at 3-0. It will be anything but that this season.

On the UEFA coefficient board, Chelsea sit 10^th. They are the only Conference League side in the top 17, only Villarreal in 9^th are in a worse position (they did not make Europe.) These coefficient points over a rolling-period determine which teams participate in the UEFA’s version of the Hunger Games, the Club World Cup, where the rich and opulent watch fatigued bodies running on fumes sacrifice ligaments for entertainment. 40m is what clubs get simply for showing up, a sum that papers generously over FFP & PSR cracks. This was the ideal opportunity for some of the forgotten men to wriggle their way into Maresca’s thinking for Premier League starting XIs.

Instead of seizing the initiative, however they ceded it. Badiashile and Disasi, who anchored a young, promising Monaco side’s central defence together made up half of the backline today. Each continued a dire-run of form by appearing utterly hapless in the sequence leading to Servette’s first. The man between them, Tosin, only watched as Crivelli made an indifferent jump to head in the winner.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s performance was bizarre to say the least – a player who was dynamically making selfless 60-yard sprints for Leicester barely looked to break a sweat. On an exhilarating break where Mudryk sprinted the length of the pitch, Dewsbury-Hall accompanied him to the box, and then oddly, just veered away at the vital moment. No support run, no movement to draw away the defender, no underlap. Baffling.

A pivot of Renato Veiga & Enzo Fernandez proved too slow even for 3^rd best side in Switzerland last summer, bypassed multiple times in different sequences. Maresca was forced to bring on Caicedo, who looked jaded in the first half against Wolves, to try and help shut shop. Marc Guiu looked uninspired – almost as if he’d spent the whole week reading headlines on which one of Victor Osimhen or Ivan Toney would get to boot him out to a loan. Jörgensen’s effort for the second goal gave Servette and Robert Sanchez a radiant ray of hope. On another day, this game could well have gone to extra time.

And therein lies the problem. With Conference League games on severely inconvenient Thursdays, followed by no turnaround time for the weekend game, such experiments with a second XI will be essential. Interestingly, coefficient points for a win in the Champions League, Europa League & Conference League group games are exactly the same. Wins in the CL group stage are significantly harder to get than a Conference League game, and offer the best possible chance for the Blues to stay above the 5 teams hounding us from below in the rankings, or to make up ground on the 9 above us.

With Champions League qualification harder than ever, and no Europe last season, it is crucial that each fixture be taken with utmost seriousness. The bonus points for the other two leagues are significantly higher once the group stages end, so the goal should be maximum wins in the group stage to keep pace with those in more privileged competitions.

We failed at that today, and that puts needless pressure on everyone else. Maresca wonders if he needs to play more starters in the grueling Thursday games to add balance. Fans wonder how Gallagher and Trev for Dewsbury-Hall and one of our CBs would have influenced the result. The Sporting Directors wonder if they need to upgrade a bomb squad to a nuke testing facility. No injuries, minor rests for our key players are minor (but important) consolations for now, but any chance of silverware this season depends on the squad realizing that that for a season with a possible 65 games, you need 22 starters, not 11. Turning off the autopilot and taking charge of the wheel is the player’s prerogative. Not Maresca’s.