Chelsea produced a dominant 5\u20131 victory over Ajax at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League, selecting an exceptionally young side and turning the tie into a showcase for its emerging talent. The starting XI had an average age of 22 years, 163 days, making it the second youngest line-up fielded by an English club in the competition. Arsenal still hold the record with a side from 2009 aged 21 years, 151 days.<\/p>\n
At 21, the Belgian midfielder was a relative veteran of the side, while Tosin Adarabioyo, 27, was the oldest starter. Marc Guiu, making his first start of the season after a loan at Sunderland was cancelled, opened the scoring. Est\u00eav\u00e3o converted a penalty in first-half stoppage time, and Tyrique George came off the bench at half-time to finish Chelsea\u2019s fifth soon after his introduction.<\/p>\n
The goals brought immediate individual milestones. At the time of his strike, 19-year-old Guiu became Chelsea\u2019s youngest ever goalscorer in a Champions League fixture, a record he held for 32 minutes before 18-year-old Est\u00eav\u00e3o lowered it. George, also 19 and marginally younger than Guiu, began the night by entering the club\u2019s history and finished it third on that list. With three different teenagers on the scoresheet, Chelsea became the first club in the Champions League era to register goals from three separate teenagers in the same match.<\/p>\n
Maresca, who also introduced 17-year-old Reggie Walsh and 19-year-old Josh Acheampong from the bench, reacted to the result and the performance. \u201cI\u2019m very proud,\u201d Maresca said. \u201cIt\u2019s a special night for the club, for the young players. I think Guiu already scored for Chelsea five or six goals last year in the Conference League, Ty already scored also in the Premier League and Est\u00eav\u00e3o is exactly the same. It was a great night, especially for these young players and for the club.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the selection policy, Maresca added: \u201cIt\u2019s the strategy of the club. We have so many young players. I think already last season we were the youngest squad in the history of the Premier League, so this season we continue in the same way.\u201d With Lavia the only player retained from the side that began against Forest on Saturday, the manager stressed the need for rotation. \u201cWe changed tonight from the Forest game 10 players. It\u2019s not easy from the Premier League to the Champions League to change so many players, but we need to do that, otherwise they are going to struggle because of many games,\u201d the manager explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chelsea routed Ajax 5-1 as three teenagers scored, producing the club’s youngest Champions League XI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,172],"tags":[1047,884],"class_list":["post-3973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-champions-league","tag-chelsea-academy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3973","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=3973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3973\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}