For a brief moment there in the second half, it looked like Chelsea might really run away with the game, and put up the sort of crooked scoreline that would truly highlight the silliness of this third-rate UEFA competition called the Conference League.
Instead, after Nicolas Jackson’s quickfire brace that gave us a 4-0 lead, we relaxed a bit and called it job-done, and let the home team get a consolation goal. That’s unlikely to matter at all in the end, but it would’ve been nice to finish the day with a clean sheet as well.
Still, plenty to be happy about, with one foot in the final and some solid momentum and confidence building here at season’s end.
“Very happy, first of all, because we can reach the final — that is an important target for us. It’s European competition.
“I think the performance for one hour, seventy minutes was a good performance. Then we drop a little bit the last fifteen, twenty minutes — probably because of the [scoreline] but we cannot allow ourselves to drop, because the game is always complicated. But overall very happy with the performance and with the result.”
-Enzo Maresca; source: Chelsea TV via Reddit
In the previous round, Chelsea took a similarly emphatic scoreline back home for the second leg, and proceeded to not take that second leg seriously at all. While we still won the tie, we suffered the embarrassment of a home defeat against far inferior opposition. And it wasn’t so much the result itself, but the manner in which we approached the game (the word “disrespected” was thrown around, not without reason).
Maresca’s hoping to avoid any such shenanigans this time around.
“For sure the next leg at home we’re gonna finish our job. [We] have the experience from Warsaw that we won there zero-three, and then at home we struggle. So that is a good experience because we can learn from that. So we need to finish the job at home.”
-Enzo Maresca; source: YouTube via Reddit
Indeed.