When Enzo Maresca started working with his players at Chelsea he dedicated as much time to the classroom as the pristine pitches at their Cobham training ground.
Every coach has their own style and players are accustomed nowadays to lengthy time spent analysing video footage of matches, training sessions, individual and collective performances.
But Maresca has a particularly intense, demanding, disciplined brand of football and he feels that initially implanting his ideas in players’ heads is as important as working at it with a football.
Still, in terms of a body of his own work from which to choose examples, Maresca was limited. He remains somewhat an untested head coach at senior level. A brief six-month spell at Parma in Serie B that failed, and a fantastic season guiding Leicester City to the Championship title.
So, naturally, there were plenty of clips of Leicester last season, and one new player in the room who kept appearing in them, prompting jokes from his new team-mates about being teacher’s pet.
There was good reason: Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, signed for £30m the day after Maresca joined, excelled under the Italian, scoring 12 times and setting up a further 15 goals.
How Chelsea perform is one of the most intriguing aspects of the impending season. An unproven manager signed for all the right reasons, a bloated squad, a third season of the Toddy Boehly-Clearlake Capital era that still nobody can quite understand.
Maresca has started by wiping the slate clean, holding meetings with senior players but also those out of favour under Mauricio Pochettino last season, to let them know they have every chance to impress him.
Maresca spoke with Cole Palmer on the phone several times during the forward’s extended break after the European Championship with England. That will be an intriguing relationship: Palmer was the Premier League’s breakout star last season, but was afforded a level of freedom under Pochettino roaming from the right wing he might not find playing for Maresca, who is considering deploying him centrally.
Maresca’s plans may take time to make sense. “I remember he said to us at Leicester after six months or a year, there might be teething problems at the start but it will improve,” Dewsbury-Hall said after settling in.
“Within the first week at Leicester I was convinced this was top, top level. I felt a bit stupid, I thought I knew a lot about football but he was teaching me things on a daily basis that I didn’t really know before. He has an aura, he can be strict, or gentle and soft – he has both sides.
“I am getting the same feedback here with the lads. They’ve bought into it here from minute one which is exciting. With a system and philosophy you need everyone to buy in because, if they do, you can really achieve something.”
If a player saying they knew nothing about football before working with a coach sounds familiar, it’s because plenty have said it about Pep Guardiola.
Ilkay Gundogan told ESPN he “didn’t know anything about football before” working with Guardiola. And this was John Stones at the European Championship in the summer: “I thought I knew football before playing under Pep, but quickly I realised I knew nothing because of how he sees the game and wants us to play football.”
That is not where the similarities with Guardiola end.
If Maresca’s ethos sound similar to a football manager who has won the Premier League six times in seven seasons, it’s because it was born from seeing Guardiola’s ideas on the ground, as a player, and honed alongside him, as a coach.
Maresca fell in love with Guardiola’s football when as a player at Sevilla he faced Guardiola’s Barcelona team of Lionel Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta.
Maresca knew the best way to learn from the best was to work with them, and when he landed a job as manager of Manchester City’s Elite Development Squad he spent as much time as possible observing Guardiola’s sessions with the first team, then got to witness first-hand how to manage a team to football’s Holy Grail, returning as Guardiola’s assistant, after that poor period at Parma, for the Treble-winning season in 2022-23.
Still, the Guardiola label, while making Maresca an intriguing prospect for football club owners, is one he would wish to peel off eventually.
When he was interviewed for the Leicester City job, the owners said they wanted to play like Manchester City. Maresca pointed out they didn’t have the players and that he had his own style. It was the same again when he was interviewed for the role at Chelsea, Maresca explaining that he had his own ideas and that it takes time.
There has no doubt been a Manchester City-fication at Chelsea in recent years, adding recruitment experts Joe Shields and Stewart Thompson to their scouting team last year, formerly at City during the years the club grew into the strongest in the country.
In some circles Maresca has adopted the nickname Diet Pep – although that is perhaps in large part down to their similar looks -their bald heads and stubbled chins – and unfair on a coach who has had little time to make his own mark on the game, and in the little time he has had he has won a title.
“He’s an incredible, lovely person – him, his family,” Guardiola said when asked about the Diet Pep comparison. “Nice people deserve the best. The most important thing as a manager is to believe in something deeply – deeply, deeply, deeply. Whatever the results, stick with my idea. He believes in what he does and will have success. I dunno how long but he will have it.”
When they worked closely together Guardiola came to believe Maresca would become a great coach – likening the feeling to the one he had with Mikel Arteta.
But Arteta took time to work at Arsenal and was almost sacked before his own ideas bedded in. Will Maresca be afforded the same patience at Chelsea, whose owners made him a third permanent managerial appointment in two years? Surely the owners need to change approach to allow a coach the time to bed in and fix the mess the club has become?
It may not be a smooth ride ahead. Pre-season results have done little to inspire confidence, although pre-seasons can be misleading.
If a manager has a strict, unrelenting system the only way players buy into it is if it delivers results, but there can often be a difficult transitionary period. And Maresca is uncompromising in his system – players must adapt, or move on.
Once, for example, he told Leicester goalkeeper Mads Hermansen that if he kept playing long passes he would be substituted in the second half of a match.
But Maresca is trying to lay the groundwork for success. One source with close connections to Chelsea told i training has been tough and demanding but that the players like Maresca and his ideas. Maresca has told his players to play aggressively with and without the ball, with high tempo, pressing football.
He is trying to get the defence to drop back significantly compared to under Pochettino, an area Maresca identified when watching Chelsea’s games last season as costing them goals. He also felt the press was slightly delayed under Pochettino, an aspect he intends to tighten.
The video analysis sessions are incisive and detailed. Double training sessions have become standard – different to the more relaxed approach of, say, Carlo Ancelotti. And training sessions are said to be varied every day, something Steve McClaren has been known for and a reason Sir Alex Ferguson rated him so highly. If players are training a lot, Maresca does not want them to get bored.
Maresca pretty much always played a 4-3-3 formation at Leicester, with two wingers and a striker, and it will be the same at Chelsea. The formation switches to 4-5-1 when defending, and 3-2-5 in possession – with the intention flood the opponent’s half with attacking players and control the ball there.
Can he make it work at Chelsea? Can Diet Pep become Pepsi Max-resca? It’s going to be fascinating to find out.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/Uk24vSD
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