Chelsea: Marc Cucurella goal could be the sliding doors moment for Enzo Maresca amid Champions League target | OneFootball

Blues are firmly on course to achieve Champions League target after a 1-0 win over Leicester

Your matchday briefing on Chelsea, featuring team news and expert analysis from Malik Ouzia

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Five at the back, two sitting midfielders in front, and a team and a stadium willing desperately for the whistle to blow.

This was not quite how Enzo Maresca envisaged seeing his Chelsea team climb back into the top-four, inflicting another relegation blow to his doomed former employers in the process, but he will take it all the same.

Performances, Maresca insisted in the early days of his Blues tenure, were of greater importance than results. Now, though, the reverse is explicitly true.

This one should not have been quite so hard won and it is difficult to know whether the fact that Chelsea are winning in spite of their best player is good news or bad. Points in the immediacy are all that matters, but will they really keep coming against better opposition if Palmer is playing - or at least finishing - like this?

Cole Palmer saw his penalty saved in the first-half

AFP via Getty Images

When the 22-year-old tournament novice left the sanctuary of England’s halfway-line huddle in Dusseldorf last summer, to stride towards the crucial first kick of a Euro 2024 quarter-final shootout against Switzerland, not for a step of the lonely walk did you doubt him.

Nor had you, really, in the moments before any of the 17 penalties he had taken in senior football before and since, each one scored with a growing sense of inevitability.

And yet here, as he waited to try to spark what might have become a routine win, that doubt, unmistakably, crept in.

Stamford Bridge felt and sounded nervous. Palmer looked it, too. Carrying the burden of a an eight-game goal blank, the playmaker fidgeted, rocked back on his heels and then up onto his toes, like a racehorse lit up by the pre-parade. He was made to re-spot the ball by referee Tim Robinson and stalled by potent delaying tactics from Mads Hermansen in the Foxes goal.

Stood there over the ball, the penalty master had the air of a confused Pablo Picasso, brush in hand eyeing up the canvas, trying to remember how to paint.

Hermansen’s save was excellent, but Palmer’s kick nothing like his best, drilled low without the precision required to beat the ’keeper’s correct guess of a dive. Perhaps the most damning assessment of his recent scoring form is that it felt a shocking moment, but not an outcome of surprise.

Maresca knows the importance of Palmer’s goals to his side’s chances in the run-in, hence the decision to start him in Europe for the first time against Copenhagen on Thursday night in the hope a step down in competition might shake the rut. The Italian can only be so accommodating, though. Here, he took his talisman off with 20 minutes to play and only one goal in it, the first time Palmer has been substituted all season in a game not already won.

Marc Cucurella scored the only goal of the game against Leicester

Getty Images

An unhappy feature of Palmer’s dry spell has been the number of glaring misses that have proven turning points in games. There was an opening fluffed at Manchester City in late-January, which would have put the Blues 2-0 ahead in a game that finished 3-1 the other way. There was another at Villa Park a few weeks later, again with the game in the balance and, again, Chelsea going on to lose.

For 45 minutes either side of half-time, this had the makings of another. The penalty had been a gift, offered by Victor Kristiansen’s needless trip on Jadon Sancho and you sensed a fear at just how far Chelsea might regret not greedily accepting it. This is a team that has struggled to create chances against anyone not called Southampton over the last month.

Instead, happily, it is Cucurella’s breakthrough that may turn out to be the true sliding doors moment. Should Chelsea, back in the top-four now, hold their position until season’s end, it will look a priceless goal.