Enzo Maresca has acknowledged Chelsea must reduce avoidable bookings after a series of dismissals earlier this season. The manager tempered his previous insistence that the squad had no disciplinary problem, saying players need to learn to avoid meaningless cautions during matches.<\/p>\n
Maresca singled out Liam Delap alongside Malo Gusto and Jo\u00e3o Pedro, who were sent off earlier this season for two yellow cards, and contrasted those incidents with straight red cards shown to Robert S\u00e1nchez and Trevoh Chalobah for denying goalscoring opportunities. He spoke directly about the difference between dismissals that could be prevented and those that were harder to avoid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I say that we need to avoid a red card, it\u2019s we need to avoid red card,\u201d Maresca told Friday\u2019s press conference. \u201cI say what I think is correct to say.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes we had a red card that was difficult to avoid and sometimes we had some a red card that we could avoid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pressed on whether the problem was club-wide, Maresca admitted there was room for improvement. \u201cI think that some of the red cards that we concede, we can avoid it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s also something that we need to learn. Something that we have to do better. And for sure, no doubt that in the future we\u2019re going to be better also on that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The manager\u2019s post-match message to Delap after the win over Wolves became a central talking point. Maresca said Delap apologised to the squad immediately after the game and that he did not need to have a prolonged conversation with the striker.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t need to speak with Liam,\u201d Maresca continued. \u201cI spoke with Liam, but Liam, he knows everything. He\u2019s aware of the situation. He knows that he made a mistake. And full stop. No more than that.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably because I\u2019m not from England so sometimes when I try to translate from Italian to English, sometimes it\u2019s a bit different. Liam, when he\u2019s inside the pitch, is more focused to do his battle against the central defender than the rest. This was what I was telling, what I was trying to say after that game.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are three players in this team that I know them better than the rest. Rom\u00e9o Lavia, Cole Palmer and Liam Delap because I know them from the Under-21s [at Manchester City], four years ago. So I know Liam always and I know that Liam will be a fantastic player for us but there are some things like the rest that he needs to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca urges Chelsea to stop avoidable bookings and improve discipline among his players this season<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4168,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,172],"tags":[319,1207],"class_list":["post-4169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-cole-palmer","tag-disciplinary-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169","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=4169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}