Marc Cucurella: Chelsea star emerges as a scoring force amid attacking crisis to further highlight importance | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca’s late tactical tweak reaped its reward as Chelsea beat Leicester to bolster their Champions League hopes

Marc Cucurella has stepped up during a period of crisis for Chelsea

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As recently as mid-December, the 27-year-old still had a single-figure goal tally across the course of his entire senior career. In two-and-a-half seasons at Chelsea, he was still yet to find the net in the Premier League, having done so only once for Brighton before that.

Yet suddenly, in a period in which the goals for some of Maresca’s key men have dried up, Cucurella has emerged as a scoring force, with four in the last dozen league games. That is more than Cole Palmer across the same period, and more than any of Pedro Neto, Jadon Sancho and Christopher Nkunku have managed all term.

Maresca’s tactical set-up is putting Cucurella in more advanced positions than when playing as a conventional full-back, or even wing-back, earlier in his career. Here, he played high on the left as Chelsea effectively switched to a back-three in possession, part of a late tweak that Maresca says he initiated only after seeing Leicester’s team sheet and realising they would line up with five in defence.

Whether that ought to have been as great a curveball as the Italian made out is the subject of another debate - struggling team reinforces defence away to Champions League contender is not revolutionary stuff - but he hailed Cucurella’s adaptability as crucial to the new plan’s not-overly-convincing success.

“The plan was to play Marco Cucurella next to Moises Caicedo as a midfielder,” he explained, after seeing his side climb back into the top four. “But when we see them defending with five, we need to attack with six. So Cucurella was higher.

“He's intelligent. He scored two goals with his head against Wolves and Brentford and he's probably the smallest one in the team. This shows you how intelligent he is because he's in the right position. He's playing like attacking midfielder and he's doing fantastic.”

Marc Cucurella celebrates his winning goal against Leicester

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Cucurella’s importance to Maresca’s side had been growing even before he added a scoring habit to his game. Having briefly lost his place in the autumn, he has since started 17 of the Blues’s last 18 league games, playing 90 minutes in all but one of those and only missing out entirely when suspended. Twice, since the turn of the year Maresca has tried to rest him in cup competitions and ended up bringing him on before the start of the second-half.

One of few senior players in a young squad, Cucurella spoke well last week about the need for this team to prove itself ready to compete for major trophies and it is no coincidence that he and Enzo Fernandez - both major tournament winners at international level - have emerged as the grittier heart of a team that has lost its early season capacity for blowing teams away with dynamism in attack.

The Spaniard’s surprise scoring run has come at a pivotal time for Chelsea, who are without their second- and third-highest league scorers in Nicolas Jackson and Noni Madueke because of injury, and have seen their leading marksman, Palmer, embark on a nine-game goal drought at the same time.

Maresca is almost out of the woods on that score: he hopes to have his injured forwards back the other side of this month’s international break, and hopes, perhaps even more, that their returns will help unlock Palmer’s magic once more.

Before then, the Blues play only twice, against Copenhagen with a 2-1 lead in the Conference League, and then away to an Arsenal side facing an even more severe dearth of options in attack.