Chelsea: Signs of revival immediately crushed as FA Cup exit builds pressure on Conference League success | OneFootball

Blues now have one realistic chance of ending the season with a piece of silverware

A few days ago, Enzo Maresca declared himself delighted at the closing of the transfer window, sensing it would bring fresh focus to the final months of Chelsea’s season and take a major distraction off his plate.

The most generous interpretation of this miserable display is that it will have the same affect. Chelsea on this form, though, do not merit much generosity.

With a performance lacking urgency or threat, the Blues crashed out of the FA Cup in a 2-1 fourth round defeat at Brighton, relying on an all-time clanger from Bart Verbruggen for their early goal, only to be trumped by strikes from Georginio Rutter and Kauro Mitoma.

So it is, that Chelsea are left relying on Europe’s third-tier club competition to deliver the first silverware of the Todd Boehly-Clearlake project at what will be the end of its third season. Some way north of a billion pounds has been spent in that time, with loftier ambitions than that. Ironically, £200million of it has ended up here at Brighton, where supporters had not seen a home win in three months.

There are other barometers for success and should Maresca’s first season in charge end in Champions League qualification then it will certainly go down as that.

But this is a club that, for more than two decades now, even in periods bleak by so many metrics, have been defined by silverware. They are, in may ways, the anti-Tottenham.

And as much as his players were desperate here, Maresca is not covering himself in glory, his tactics looking overly rigid and his substitutions like-for-like even as his team hurtled towards elimination.

In 90 minutes, they managed just two shots “on target”; one was a Cole Palmer strike that was probably going over anyway, and the other was a cross.

It was bundled in, somehow, by Verbruggen and chalked down as an own-goal in spirit, even if Palmer’s delivery may technically have been on target.

Otherwise, the home goal was untouched by a team missing its two recognised centre-forwards in Marc Guiu and Nicolas Jackson, and instead spearheaded by an alternative in Christopher Nkunku who simply refused to play the part.

Drafted in to lead the line, after Maresca decided against the nuclear option he had hinted at on Friday of picking himself, Nkunku popped up just about everywhere else: at No10, drifting wide, even dropping in to pick the ball up off the toes of his centre-half.

Too often, he slipped into the same spaces between the lines as Palmer, the pair like two men cramped into the hind legs of a pantomime horse and stubbornly refusing to wear the face.

Nkunku is a fine creative fulcrum but, in Palmer, Chelsea already have just about the best of those and needed a dose of orthodoxy up front. Instead, Nkunku finished with a 100 per cent pass completion rate, but without even attempting a shot.

Sure, Chelsea have been unlucky in this instance, with Guiu and Jackson injured in the same game within hours of the end of the window, just as Joao Felix’s departure to AC Milan should have left Nkunku’s primary task as backup to Palmer at No10. But in so many other areas, the Blues have made problems for themselves.

There was a time at the start of this season when the most interesting thing about the Chelsea team sheet was working out who wasn’t on it.

Ineffective: Christopher Nkunku

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Such was their depth that, week after week through the autumn, at least one high-profile name would find themselves without even a place on the end of the substitutes’s bench. Across the course of a month, you could more or less assemble a power-ranking among Maresca’s crop: who’s hot and who’s not?

Gone, though, are those days. After six senior players were allowed to leave the club last month, and with another seven missing to either injury or suspension here, Maresca’s bench looked eerily like that of an ordinary Premier League club, stretched thin on emergence from the busiest period of the season.

On it were as many young academy products as established outfield pros: three, with the former lot including in Ishé Samuels-Smith, yet to make his debut and in a match day squad for the first time under Marecsa.

There was also Aaron Anselmino, the young defender recalled from Boca Juniors at the start of last month but yet to play a first-team minute, nor likely to any time soon having been left out of an updated Conference League squad this week. And there was Mathis Amougou, the club’s sole January signing who Maresca said on Friday has explicitly not been earmarked for a significant role this term.

Chelsea themselves still have time to carve something substantial from a season on the ropes. But there is suddenly an awful lot of pressure on Thursday nights in Europe and a competition that was supposed to be a stroll.