Enzo Maresca offered his thoughts on squad management for the Carabao Cup.
**Chelsea**play against **Wolves**in the fourth round of the tournament on Wednesday evening, and they will be trying to take home their first domestic title of the BlueCo era after bagging the Club World Cup and Conference League earlier this year. However, a rotated lineup is likely to feature.
Injuries have hurt the camp after the extended schedule from the summer, and the fixtures are piling up across multiple fronts. For the sake of long-term competitiveness, Maresca must manage minutes.
“I try to focus in game by game, no matter which competition it is. We try to go as far as we can.
“Liam Delap* took part in a complete lead session yesterday and is available for tomorrow. No, 90 minutes, no. It's I think two months now that he's out, so he needs gradually back to 100%.*
“*Enzo Fernandez**, Moises Caicedo, Joao Pedro, they are all players that we need to protect.*
“I think for Chelsea all the competitions are important. Chelsea has to try to win games and to try to win competitions. So for me personally, all the competitions are important.
“The reason why is because we need to rotate, we need to protect players because if we go with the same 11, we're going to struggle during the season. So we need to rotate and probably we're going to make some changes. I don't know how many, but we're going to make some changes.
“For sure we're going to make some changes. I don't know now if nine, 10, like we did between Forest and Ajax. But for sure we're going to make changes again because we need to do that.
“As you said, it's three games away from the final. So we need to have the desire to play for that. As we said many times, we need to go game by game. Now the first one is Wolves tomorrow. We need to be focused on that. And then hopefully winning the game we can think about the next one.”