Enzo Maresca admitted he was furious with his players at half-time after Chelsea edged League One Lincoln City 2-1 in the Carabao Cup.<\/p>\n
The Italian resisted making changes at the interval and was quickly rewarded when Tyrique George and Facundo Buonanotte struck inside the opening five minutes of the second half to turn a tense match in Chelsea\u2019s favour. The late scoreline left the visitors with a nervy victory but progression to the next round.<\/p>\n
Maresca linked the flat first-half display to the side\u2019s morale following a disappointing defeat to Manchester United at the weekend, saying the squad lacked the right mentality against lower-league opposition.<\/p>\n
Asked if he was angry with his players at the break, the Italian responded: \u201cAbsolutely, absolutely, absolutely.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know some of them didn\u2019t play these kind of games. I asked them how many times they had played against League One teams because you need to play a different kind of game.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not the same game because the desire is double from them. We struggled a bit in the first half but we were much better in the second half and we won the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the next game is against a League One or League Two team away, for sure this experience will be good for the next one. This has been a good experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chelsea fielded a strong starting XI, including summer recruits Alejandro Garnacho, Jamie Gittens and Jorrel Hato. Regular first-team players Enzo Fern\u00e1ndez, Wesley Fofana and Trevoh Chalobah also started, highlighting Maresca\u2019s intent to approach the cup tie seriously despite the opponents\u2019 lower-league status.<\/p>\n
The manager\u2019s halftime intervention and faith in his starters produced the decisive early second-half goals, but the performance reinforced Maresca\u2019s point that matches against League One sides demand a different intensity and focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca said “Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.” Chelsea “struggled” early but won at Lincoln.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3030,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1067,190],"tags":[227,1066,884],"class_list":["post-3031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carabao-cup","category-chelsea","tag-alejandro-garnacho","tag-carabao-cup","tag-chelsea-academy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031","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=3031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}