Chelsea left Goodison Park with their hopes of a surprise Premier League title challenge dented, but head coach Enzo Maresca’s faith in his team’s progress reinforced.
“I just said to the players that I am more happy than after the Brentford game (where Chelsea won 2-1 at home last Sunday),” Maresca said in his press conference after a match ruined by the wind and rain ended goalless. “The reason why is because I was quite worried about (this) game; a tricky game, a tricky stadium, a tricky team.
“They (Everton) are defensively top. They are one of the five best teams in Europe in terms of clean sheets. You struggle to create chances against them, and it was not an easy game. You have to deal (with it) and you have to learn to play different games; long balls, second balls, set pieces. Football is not just what we do on the ball — it is also how you defend and deal with that.”
It is not hard to understand Maresca’s desire to emphasise the positives. This felt throughout like the type of game Chelsea have lost many times in recent years — not least because they had lost this exact fixture on five of their previous six Premier League visits. They might have done so again had Robert Sanchez not made several good saves and Tosin Adarabioyo not pulled off a towering block from Iliman Ndiaye.
Yes, there had been a chance for Chelsea to go top of the Premier League with a win, a milestone that would have been welcomed by majority owners Clearlake Capital after a painful two and a half years since the end of the Roman Abramovich era. But the emphatic manner in which leaders Liverpool subsequently overpowered Tottenham Hotspur 6-3 in north London later in the day ensured it would only have been a fleeting return to first place.
The fact that they did not get their noses in front of Arne Slot’s men will help Maresca in his quest to dampen any talk of Chelsea as serious title contenders: they went on to lift the trophy on all five occasions where they topped the table on Christmas Day, but did not finish as champions on any of the four occasions they sat in second place on December 25.
But there is a related statistic that goes even further to back up Maresca’s view of how far away his team truly are: Chelsea’s 35 points from the season’s first 17 games is the lowest total any second-placed team has had by Christmas Day in a Premier League campaign (except for pandemic-disrupted 2020-21 and the one paused for the playing of a winter World Cup two years later) since 2010.
In any normal Premier League season, this young Chelsea side would not be talked about as title contenders. The fact they have been is indicative of the reality that 2024-25 is anything but normal: four-in-a-row champions Manchester City have collapsed, Arsenal are failing to consistently perform to expectations and Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth are exploiting the void where more established top-four-finish chasers would usually be found.
Sunday’s experience at Goodison offered evidence of the positive strides they have made but also the ground they still have to cover. Chelsea showed just enough determination and backbone to be denied two points rather than three at one of their least favourite away grounds, but counterpart Sean Dyche’s defensive game plan also exposed some of the more exploitable aspects of Maresca’s approach.
Chelsea’s more identifiable structure strengthens them in possession and in defensive transition, which was Mauricio Pochettino’s big weakness as Maresca’s 2023-24 predecessor. But the attacking alignment of their box midfield made it obvious to Dyche where Everton should focus their defensive energy within their low block.
Cole Palmer, so often unplayable, was made uncomfortable.
Other elements of Maresca’s midfield structure invited questions.
Would it not have been better to have Malo Gusto invert into the base of midfield and push Enzo Fernandez further forward into the left pocket, from where his late runs into the opposition box have yielded a rich vein of scoring form in recent weeks?
Instead, it was Gusto who was tasked with jumping all the way forward from left-back, where he was deputising for the suspended Marc Cucurella, into the final third, where the precision of his passing did not match that of his Chelsea peers. Everton were not worried by him, which allowed them to divert more manpower towards Palmer and Jadon Sancho, unsurprisingly much quieter here than on his previous away outing against Spurs two weeks ago.
Maresca’s decision to wait until the 75th minute to turn to his bench suggested he was happy with what he was seeing. That was perhaps an overly optimistic view of proceedings, but while Chelsea could have lost yesterday, they might also have won if Nicolas Jackson had converted one of two presentable chances in the first half.
“We arrived to the Christmas moment second in the table with the best attack and one of the best defences, so we are happy,” Maresca added in his post-match press conference. “But the most important thing is we need to learn to play different kinds of games and (this) was not an easy game.”
Maresca and his players are still learning about themselves and each other at this level. There will be more low blocks from opponents, more wet and windy days, more struggles to convert in attack and battles to hold it all together in defence.
Within that context, spending Christmas Day in the top two for the first time in seven years is as good as anyone at Stamford Bridge could have hoped for.
(Top photo: Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
