Maresca’s “control” claims insult Chelsea fans’ intelligence, and passing stats prove it | OneFootball

It was immensely frustrating for Chelsea fans yesterday to watch their team trot out against a weakened Arsenal team and put in a pathetic effort which led to an easy win for the Gunners.

What makes that even worse is to hear from your coach that he thinks you played well.

“I think overall we struggled a bit in the first 20 minutes, but after than we controlled the game, we created some chances… second half the game was there 50/50.”

You can see Maresca speaking in the clip from the club embedded here:

Chelsea “controlled the game”? Either he’s stupid, or he’s lying. And we don’t think he’s stupid. He’s taking the supporters for fools once again, telling them to deny the evidence of their own eyes and believe that the tepid showing they saw was actually good, in fact.

We may have had more of the ball, but that’s because once Arsenal scored they had no need to be involved. They sat back and let us keep possession and we were totally toothless with it.

Stats show it was Arsenal controlling Chelsea

Chelsea’s heatmap from Arsenal defeat.

Look at the stats – Chelsea played 515 passes to Arsenal’s 348. Does that mean we controlled the game? Well they had 12 shots to our 8, so obviously not. They had 33% more shots with 75% of the possession. That indicates how much more dangerous they were – just imagine if they’d actually needed a goal. We’d have been sunk.

Of our 515 passes, 81 came from Benoit Badiashile, 77 from Levi Colwill, 52 from Marc Cucurella, 35 from Wesley Fofana and 32 from Robert Sanchez. That’s more than half of our supposed “control” coming from our back 5.

We didn’t control the game – Arsenal controlled us. If Maresca doesn’t see that, he’s not a good coach, if he does see that, he’s taking the fans for fools by pretending he doesn’t. He wants their support – well, earn it.