The wreckage of a frustrating defeat to Sunderland on Saturday is still being taken apart, and on the London is Blue podcast they had one issue with Enzo Maresca’s selection.
Maresca picks unfit players and pays the price
“Enzo Maresca was speaking about Joao Pedro, mentioning that he is not training every day because he’s managing an injury problem: ‘Moises Caicedo is the same, Enzo is the same, we have four to five players that cannot work every day’”, presenter Dan Dormer said, quoting Maresca.
“This is also on the manager though, if they’re not training and they’re not fit, don’t pick them. It was so obvious how below par their performances were. Joao Pedro struggled to get into the game at all, Caicedo looked was off his normal pace, and Enzo Fernandez was a passenger for most of the day,” Nick Verlaney pointed out.
“If they aren’t training and aren’t physically able to do it, why are you picking them?”
We couldn’t agree more. Of course you want your best players on the pitch, but if they’re going to play like that, you may as well have Romeo Lavia, Andrey Santos and Facundo Buonanotte in there. They can’t do any worse.
You can see their discussion of the injury situation in the clip embedded here:
https://twitter .com/LondonBluePod/status/1982861815718855023
In other news…
Another hot topic on the podcast this week was more on the striker situation and the dire stats around Joao Pedro’s shot volume. Marc Guiu did better in a game where he took 10 touches than JP did over 5 games…
One player we’re convinced will keep his place is Alejandro Garnacho, who went quiet after his early goal, but did carry the ball enough to be valuable to a static team.
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