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While Chelsea didn’t completely torpedo their chances of finishing in the top eight of Bigger Cup group stage by losing against Atalanta, they performed a precise, surgical strike on their own chances of waltzing straight into the round of 16. Of course, the good news is that in the short one-year history of the new and not-necessarily-improved Bigger Cup, achieving a top-eight finish isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The recently revamped competition’s first champion – Paris Saint-Germain – finished 15th in the “league phase” after Uefa jazzed things up, introducing what appears to be a Super League by stealth. And besides, if any club has sufficient personnel to deal with the added hassle of an extra playoff round, it’s surely the one with so many players on its books that their squad list has to be written on a toilet roll, with a librarian employed to keep track of all their loans.
As the extraordinarily lame gags in the previous sentence prove, Football Daily is a consistently unfunny email and subscribers invariably know what they’re going to get when it slinks apologetically into their spam folders at around the same time every day. Unfortunately for Stamford Bridge regulars, the only consistent thing about Enzo Maresca’s side is a monotonously predictable lack of consistency, which has been much remarked upon since their defeat in Bergamo on Tuesday. Since apparently rubber-stamping their Bigger Cup and Premier League credentials with an impressive beat-down of Barcelona, followed by a bad-tempered draw with Arsenal when they played for over an hour with 10 men, Chelsea have been stuffed by Leeds, played out a snoozy stalemate at Bournemouth and have now lost against a mid-table side from Serie A. While critics have been quick to lay the blame on a selection policy that appears to see Enzo Maresca rotate his team like a kebab shop’s elephant leg of doner meat, the Chelsea head coach insists that, knack and naughty step permitting, the core of his starting lineup for games against strong opposition (and Wolves) is largely set in stone.
