Chelsea arrived at Manchester City without a manager and missing several first-team regulars, chief among them goalkeeper Robert S\u00e1nchez, who was ruled out through injury. Mois\u00e9s Caicedo was suspended after receiving a fifth Premier League yellow card against Bournemouth, Wesley Fofana missed the trip with a fever and S\u00e1nchez had sustained a \u201csmall muscle problem,\u201d per BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez had started all 19 previous Premier League games this season. He even started October\u2019s victory over Liverpool despite being sent off the weekend before after serving his suspension in the Carabao Cup. That run ended at the same time as Maresca\u2019s spell, leaving McFarlane to hand the gloves to his regular understudy, Filip J\u00f6rgensen.<\/p>\n
J\u00f6rgensen has only made five appearances across all competitions this season and is still waiting for his first clean sheet. Even though S\u00e1nchez could not play at the Etihad Stadium, he was pictured with the squad in a show of support during a turbulent period for the manager-less Blues.<\/p>\n
Long-term absentee Levi Colwill also travelled to Manchester to cheer on a depleted backline. J\u00f6rgensen started behind a defence marshalled by the less-than-imposing duo of Trevoh Chalobah and Beno\u00eet Badiashile. Backup goalkeepers Gabriel Slonina and Max Merrick were included in a makeshift matchday group.<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez\u2019s absence is not thought to be prolonged. BBC Sport report that the keeper is expected to be fit in time to feature for Chelsea against Fulham at Craven Cottage this coming Wednesday. It is unclear whether a manager will have been appointed by then or if it will be Liam Rosenior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
S\u00e1nchez missed the Manchester City game with a \u201csmall muscle problem,\u201d but was pictured with Chelsea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5711,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,969],"tags":[1066,1089,1087],"class_list":["post-5712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-premier-league","tag-carabao-cup","tag-chelsea-struggles","tag-coaching-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5712","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=5712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}