Enzo Maresca says Chelsea were ‘ten times better’ in Celtic defeat

Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca said his team showed great improvement in other areas during their 4-1 defeat against Scottish champions Celtic on Saturday night.

The Blues were 2-0 down at the break after goals from Matt O’Reilly and Kyogo Furuhashi and some woeful defending saw them concede two more before Christopher Nkunku grabbed a late consolation from the penalty spot.

Chelsea opened their tour of the United States with a 2-2 draw with Wrexham but Maresca said he saw a positive improvement in that game despite the heavy defeat at Notre Dame Stadium in Indiana.

He said: “In football we need to improve things.

“We have kept the top line but if the ball is not under pressure, you need to throw it down. We are still confusing some things on the ball and off the ball. It is normal at this moment when we are trying to do something new.

“As we said, the result is always important. For us, we have to analyze the game in general. I think in football the team was ten times better than in the Wrexham game and that is important because we can see the number of chances we created in the first half and the second half. The result is always important but at this moment we need to judge and analyze different things in football we created chances, in football we probably let them go too much and it is something we need to improve.”

Maresca had previously warned the fans that his team would concede bad goals as they tried to play back and that was the case when Luis Palma closed the third after a ball between Robert Sanchez and Benoit Badiashile.

Chelsea will look to get their first friendly win of the summer under their belts when they take on Club America on Thursday morning.

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