Enzo Maresca dismissed criticism from Wayne Rooney about his use of squad rotation as Chelsea prepared to face Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday. Rooney, speaking on The Wayne Rooney Show, questioned the stability of a side that is regularly changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe players want to play, they want to build relationships,\u201d he said on The Wayne Rooney Show . \u201cWhen you keep chopping and changing then the players won\u2019t be happy. I think that will come back to bite them.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they are getting results all the time then you can\u2019t question it but if they\u2019re not, there has to be questions asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think most clubs now have a leadership group and as a group you have to go and question the manager. You hear people talk about \u2018player power\u2019 but this isn\u2019t player power. \u201cI\u2019d be concerned if the team kept changing. If i was in that [leadership] group I\u2019d be speaking to my teammates saying, \u2018Look, I\u2019m not happy with this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Maresca\u2019s reply was measured and focused on the broader context of his selection policy. \u201cI said already many times, we are in a moment, in an era where anyone can say what they want,\u201d Maresca responded. \u201cIt\u2019s correct, I completely respect, but I also said after the Qaraba\u011f game that since I joined the club, it\u2019s also my view to rotate players, and no-one complained in the moment that you don\u2019t win a game. I can understand that no-one disagreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that when the rotation is Andrey Santos, Brazil international player, Jorrel Hato, Holland international player, Est\u00eav\u00e3o Willian, Brazil international player, it\u2019s not about rotation. They are good, they are talented, they are young, and for sure when they are young, you have to give them the chance to make some mistakes, to be better. The same thing I think happened in the past with Josh Acheampong.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut again, I understand that when you don\u2019t win a game, the problem is the rotation or defending.\u201d<\/p>\n
The midweek draw with Qaraba\u011f also brought an early injury concern as Rom\u00e9o Lavia pulled up with a muscle problem inside the opening minutes, ending what was his 30th appearance since his move to Chelsea in the summer of 2023. The Belgian has already missed 77 games for the Blues because of nine previous injuries.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have an update at the moment, so we need to wait still some hours to do all the checks that he needs, but for sure at the moment he\u2019s injured,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a shame. It\u2019s a shame in this moment also because we are trying to minimise menus for him. But even with that, he\u2019s injured again. We need to insist until we find the right solution for him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca rejects Rooney’s criticism over rotation and updates on Rom\u00e9o Lavia’s latest injury. update.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4309,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,172],"tags":[944,1089,1215],"class_list":["post-4310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-andrey-santos","tag-chelsea-struggles","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310","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=4310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}