Questions in press conferences are usually pretty dull: injury news, team news, a bit of transfer chat, a mention for the opposition manager or team, a word on a player in form. That usually just about wraps it up, unless someone from TalkSport is there with a cringey comedy curveball.
But today Enzo Maresca was thrown a rather interesting curve ball about the pitch at Stamford Bridge. The interviewer wanted to know whether the “tight” pitch at Stamford Bridge was affecting the style of play the coach was trying to implement.
“I think in the end, the pitches more or less are all the same. Sometimes the pitch looks big when we are in the right position. When we do not move a lot, sometimes we want to move a lot and we make the pitch small. It depends more on how we behave than the pitch,” was Maresca’s response.
Pitch logic doesn’t track
We’re not sure the logic even tracks particularly well. Chelsea, if they’re going to press high up, would surely prefer a smaller pitch, where they have less ground to cover. That makes it harder for the opposition to play through them or over them, and means the Blues would be even closer to goal when they win the ball back.
To us, a big pitch would favour a team playing long balls. But either way, as Maresca says, you’ve got to play on all sorts of pitches anyway, so the style has to be ready for anything.
We wonder what prompted this question – was it a sneaky one from the owners trying to make everyone get behind a stadium move? Still, we’re all in favour of more interesting and original questions, so no complaints from us…
