Chelsea slumped to a 3\u20131 defeat to Leeds United on Wednesday, a result Enzo Maresca accepted was deserved after a poor showing. Jaka Bijol opened the scoring with a header, Ao Tanaka added a second with a long-range effort before half-time, and a calamitous pass out from the back allowed Dominic Calvert-Lewin to finish with just under 20 minutes remaining. Pedro Neto reduced the deficit soon after the restart.<\/p>\n
Maresca did not hide his disappointment. “A very poor night,” Maresca said bluntly. “[Leeds] deserved to win the game, they were better in all aspects.<\/p>\n
“There is nothing that we can take from this game. The only thing we can do is try to understand the mistake we have done, try to reset, because in 48 hours we have one more game.<\/p>\n
“I hope that we had a bad night because they were … on the ball, off the ball, second ball, they were much better than us in all the aspects.”<\/p>\n
Neto, hailed by Maresca as one of very few positives after the final whistle, offered a thoroughly unimpressed reflection to Sky Sports. “They were better than us at everything,” he conceded. “It\u2019s difficult to take, we have to learn from that but we have to clear our minds, it happens. We are already focused on Bournemouth.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes it happens, we had a bad day, they had more intensity, attitude, won the second balls and had more desire than us. We cannot take games for granted. Of course it hurts, it\u2019s the worst part in football, Sometimes you can lose and say you gave everything on the pitch, but today we have to take some responsibility, all of us. Sometimes it happens, we are human.<\/p>\n
“We had a really good month, it\u2019s just a bad day. We don\u2019t have explanation for that. Everyone wants to win.” <\/p>\n
With Chelsea chasing the game at the interval, Maresca made the surprise call to withdraw 18-year-old Est\u00eav\u00e3o after the youngster picked up a yellow card following a petulant swipe at Gabriel Gudmundsson. “I think the feeling with Est\u00eav\u00e3o was, you know, a little bit \u2018welcome to Leeds,\u2019” Maresca said. “Sometimes aged 18, you struggle to manage emotion, so it was better to change him and to avoid any red card.” <\/p>\n
Maresca also highlighted the absence of Mois\u00e9s Caicedo. “We missed Moi tonight,” he said. “We\u2019re going to miss Moi in the next game. He\u2019s an important player.<\/p>\n
“Moi is a player that for us is an important player for any team in the world, because he\u2019s top.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maesca: Chelsea were outplayed in all aspects in a 3\u20131 defeat to Leeds; Neto called it a bad day….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,702,172],"tags":[1140,1089],"class_list":["post-4885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-leeds-united","category-epl","tag-caicedo","tag-chelsea-struggles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4885","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=4885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}