Enzo Maresca singled out Est\u00eav\u00e3o as the catalyst in Chelsea\u2019s win over Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday night, drawing a direct comparison with Cole Palmer.<\/p>\n
The summer signing from Palmeiras has been used sparingly, but his influence was unmistakable once introduced. Within 60 seconds of his substitution \u2014 greeted by an almighty roar from the Stamford Bridge crowd \u2014 Est\u00eav\u00e3o jinked to the byline and drilled a low ball into the box which dropped for Jo\u00e3o Pedro to fire Chelsea into a 2\u20130 lead. The goalscorer made sure everyone knew who was behind the moment of ignition by pointing to his compatriot.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s doing fantastic. For this club, in the next 5\u201310 years, he will be a top, top player,\u201d Maresca gushed postgame. \u201cThe reason why fans pay tickets is because they want to see players like Est\u00eav\u00e3o, like Cole [Palmer]. People are happy when they are inside the pitch. The only difference is that Est\u00eav\u00e3o arrived from Brazil, he needs a little bit to adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n
A CIES Football Observatory analysis valued Est\u00eav\u00e3o at \u20ac118.1 million (\u00a3103.8 million, $136.6 million), placing him as the second most expensive teenager in world football behind Barcelona\u2019s Lamine Yamal. Chelsea paid \u20ac45 million for Est\u00eav\u00e3o this summer and Maresca accepted the premium placed on the forward. \u201cYou can see that, absolutely,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s top, he\u2019s a talent. Again, we are trying to help him to adapt and to give him the right minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maresca tempered the praise with caution about expectations. \u201cSlowly, slowly, for sure, it\u2019s going to start again for us in the future. When Est\u00eav\u00e3o was inside [the pitch], the energy raised. It\u2019s because people love that kind of player. So we are happy that he can help the team and also the fans, they can be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The manager admitted nerves before kick-off given the opponent\u2019s position in the table. \u201cI was very worried before this game, because these are the worst games, these are tricky games,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause everyone thinks it\u2019s going to be easy. I can understand that in the first half people were not happy, probably because we didn\u2019t score\u2014not the performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chelsea had 11 shots in the first 45 minutes and kept Wolves to no serious efforts. \u201cI was very, very, very happy at half time, to be honest,\u201d Maresca later revealed. \u201cThe difference between half time and second half has been that we just scored goals. When you don\u2019t concede nothing, nothing, nothing and you create four or five chances, you have to be clinical. We said many times\u2014otherwise the game is always open, anything can happen. ]”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca praised Estevao after his quick assist sparked Chelsea’s win and backed the CIES valuation..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,172],"tags":[1033,990,319],"class_list":["post-4346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-brazilian-football","tag-cies-football-observatory","tag-cole-palmer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346","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=4346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}