Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca confirmed Cole Palmer will undergo a late fitness check ahead of Saturday\u2019s trip to Brentford after an Instagram post hinted at a return. The post was captioned \u201csoon back\u201d, but Maresca made clear no selection decision has been taken yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cCole took part in the session yesterday for the first time, not the entire session,\u201d Maresca told his Friday news conference. \u201cWe have one more session this afternoon and we are going to try with him to see if he\u2019s OK, otherwise he will be out tomorrow.\u201d He added context on Palmer\u2019s recovery: \u201cHe is recovering from an injury, it\u2019s not managing him, it\u2019s recovering from an injury. When he is available, we need to manage him because of the amount of games.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maresca also provided an update on the striker situation and the club\u2019s longer-term absences. He put a return estimate of between 10 and 12 weeks on Liam Delap after a hamstring problem that did not require surgery. The manager set out the immediate attacking options: \u201cThe only No. 9 is [Marc] Guiu and Jo\u00e3o [Pedro] can also play there. Against Fulham, we used Tyrique [George] as a No. 9, so we can also think about him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defensive and midfield availability remains mixed. Levi Colwill is still sidelined with a long-term ACL injury. There are concerns over summer signing D\u00e1rio Essugo, who could miss a large part of the season after undergoing surgery on his own issue. On a more positive note, Beno\u00eet Badiashile and Rom\u00e9o Lavia returned to training in midweek.<\/p>\n
The only additional doubts are linked to Chelsea\u2019s South American players. Mois\u00e9s Caicedo returned late from Ecuador duty and will face a fitness check. Maresca confirmed there are \u201cquestion marks\u201d about Brazilian trio Jo\u00e3o Pedro, Andrey Santos and Est\u00eav\u00e3o after a gruelling defeat to Bolivia in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The manager will assess the squad across the remaining sessions before finalising his selections for Brentford.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca will assess Cole Palmer ahead of Brentford; updates on Delap, Essugo, Caicedo, squad fitness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,969],"tags":[319,945,934],"class_list":["post-2695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-premier-league","tag-cole-palmer","tag-dario-essugo","tag-enzo-maresca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}