Chelsea: Enzo Maresca need not be 'worried' as Marc Cucurella keeps Champions League hopes alive | OneFootball

A seventh goal of the season for Cucurella keeps Chelsea’s Champions League hopes in their own hands

A few weeks ago, Enzo Maresca said Chelsea would end up in trouble if they kept relying on Marc Cucurella for goals. He might just be correcting the record on that one tonight.

Aided by a wonderful piece of Reece James skill, Cucurella’s seventh goal of the season headed Chelsea to a vital victory over Manchester United, one that keeps their Champions League fate in their hands heading into the final day of the campaign.

It had been in the midst of lengthy goal droughts for Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson that Maresca had fretted over his team’s sudden dependence on their Spanish full-back.

“If Cucu is the one that is scoring more goals for us in this moment, we need to be worried,” Maresca said, after the defender had scored his side’s only goal in the drab 2-1 home defeat to Legia Warsaw last month.

Jackson, at least, had rediscovered some form since but for more than an hour here the striker’s absence through suspension after Sunday’s foolish red card at Newcastle looked on course to cost his team dear.

With Jadon Sancho ineligible to face his parent club and Christopher Nkunku and Marc Guiu both injured, Maresca started the night with teenager Tyrique George up-front and not a single attacking option on his bench. Noni Madueke had missed a golden chance early on and James trimmed the post with a majestic half-volley, but midway through the second-half Chelsea began to look desperately blunt, even with Palmer changing into some bright-coloured boots in search of a spark.

Marc Cucurella stepped up as Chelsea appeared to be running out of ideas

Chelsea FC via Getty Images

Maresca might have cast a jealous look at Ruben Amorim as he readied one-time January target Alejandro Garnacho to come on. Heck, he might have looked enviously at Harry Maguire as the kind of focal point his team lacked up-front.

But on a sixpence, James spun and with him so did the narrative of the night. The Englishman turned Garnacho and clipped a delicate, blind cross to the back-post, from where Cucurella powered home.

That Chelsea had been made to sweat so long - and here’s one you’ve not heard much this season - was to United’s credit.

These might have been two teams gunning for Champions League football, but only one of them was supposed to be doing so tonight. Yet this never had the feel of the walkover many had forecast.

Five days out from the Europa League final, Ruben Amorim named just about his strongest team, in contrast with Ange Postecoglou, who rested a number of his likely starters in Bilbao for Spurs’s trip to Villa.

True, United have been abject whoever wears the shirt in recent months and came in winless in seven in the Premier League, their worst ever run. They began here, though, with a surprising intensity, Bruno Fernandes flying into challenges and Patrick Dorgu rampant down the left. That pair would have combined to create the opener had Maguire not been mere inches offside when guiding home Fernandes’s cross.

On Thursday, Maresca had suggested his best players - the likes of Palmer, Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo - deserved to be playing in the Champions League and called on them to prove it. In response, only Caicedo had done so in the first-half here, the best player on the pitch in a fragmented, frenetic game.

And so, Chelsea were left again relying on their mop-haired charger, Cucurella a scorer of goals of consequence and increasing number.

Maresca may have wished it wasn’t quite so a month ago, but he’d take more of the same at the City Ground next weekend.