Cole Palmer has had a couple of quiet games by his standards, and then of course didn’t travel to Greece for our midweek game. So fans feel like they’ve barely seen him in the last few weeks.
The Nottingham Forest game was disappointing overall, and Liverpool was always going to be a tough game, so nobody is worrying yet that his superb form is declining. But a home game against Newcastle is the perfect change to get back to where he was a month ago.
Enzo Maresca was asked today in his press conference about how he intended to keep Palmer at his best and to help the team win even when the attacker doesn’t score and when the opposition are man-marking him, and the Italian coach gave a really interesting answer.
You can see Maresca speaking about Palmer in the clip embedded here, with this quote coming after 1 minute and 30 seconds:
Maresca explains how he’s going to keep Palmer firing despite man marking
Of course it’s a big moment for the youngster. Last season was an astonishing breakout – now it’s all about maintaining that form and showing it wasn’t just a perfect concatenation of circumstances and a hot streak.
“First of all we use that [opposition man marking] as a weapon. If they want to mark Cole we will have to find another solution. But also I think the next step forward for Cole is to get used to playing with that sort of situation. Sometimes you can see he gets a little frustrated, because it’s not easy to have 90, 95 minutes being man marked. But players of that level get used to it.”
So while Cole may get frustrated, the man marking and doubling up on him will just create chances for others, this is the “weapon” Maresca talks about. The more attention on his star man, the more space there should be for his fellow attackers to shine.
