🔗 Share this article The Manager's Unceasing Lineup Shuffling Leaves Chelsea Off Balance. While Chelsea didn't entirely destroy their prospects of ending up in the highest eight places of the Bigger Cup group stage, they performed a precise, surgical strike on their own chances of strolling directly into the round of 16. Naturally, the good news is that in the short one-year history of the new and not-necessarily-improved tournament, achieving a place in the top eight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The Core Issue: A Predictable Inconsistency Sadly for the club's supporters, the sole predictable element about Enzo Maresca’s side is a monotonously predictable lack of consistency, which has been widely discussed following their loss in Bergamo. After apparently rubber-stamping their quality with an commanding victory of Barcelona, and then a feisty stalemate with Arsenal, Chelsea have been stuffed by a Championship side, played out a snoozy stalemate at the south coast club and have now been beaten by a mid-table side from Serie A. While critics have been quick to lay the blame on a team selection approach that appears to see Enzo Maresca change his lineup constantly, the Chelsea head coach insists that, injuries and suspensions aside, the nucleus of his first eleven for big matches is largely set in stone. “I think in that game, first XI, we had on the field eight, nine players that play against Tottenham, they played against Barcelona, they play against Wolves, Arsenal,” he droned. “There were eight, nine players that are the ones playing every time for these kind of games. So if you look at the five changes that we did from the Bournemouth game, it’s different.” What Comes Next To have any realistic chance of escaping the Bigger Cup playoff round, they will have to win their final two group games. First up, they welcome this season’s surprise package Pafos, then travel back to Italy to face the Serie A champions, Napoli. “We need to win both, otherwise, we try to play the extra round and then go to the next round,” remarked Maresca, whose following fixture is a match against an Everton team whose current form has propelled them to the dizzy heights of seventh in the Premier League. Other Notes Quote of the Day: “It's interesting, it’s actually funny because his biggest dream was me becoming a professional golfer. That was his ultimate ambition. So when I was 10, he forced me to take up golf. So I played golf every week from when I was 10 to 13” – Erling Haaland revealed how, had his dad got his way, he could have been on the golf course rather than tearing it up in the top flight. Fan Correspondence “So, no wonder Wolverhampton Wanderers are in such a poor situation. As any longtime reader of this column will know, the only good pre-match protests involve marching from a pub that the supporters intended to visit anyway, to the stadium that they were inevitably going to. Just showing up 10 minutes late? That’s how long it takes fans to get to their seats anyway” – a correspondent. “I see that a reader not only got the previous letter o’ the day, but also a name check in another reader's letter. On a night where both clubs from Sheffield once more dropped points after leading, I am led to ponder: could Sheffield be proving that the frequency of representation in your letters section is inversely related to the success of anything our teams are accomplishing on the field?” – a different supporter.