Maresca answers awkward questions about goalkeeper by shifting blame to one player

Enzo Maresca’s press conferences are very positive at the moment, as you’d expect. The team are doing far better than expected and he’s getting a lot of the credit.

But journalists will always try to find the weak point, and today the questioning came about Robert Sanchez, who made two mistakes at the weekend. He’s set to be rotated out of tomorrow’s game for Filip Jorgensen, and Maresca was asked whether that a good performance from the Swede would put pressure on the first choice goalie.

The coach backed Sanchez by pointing out that one of his mistakes really stemmed from Malo Gusto, not hte keeper, and also played down any idea of a selection dilemma:

“Filip has to do well because we need him doing well, not because he needs to put pressure on Robert.

“Robert’s mistake, the mistake started with Malo; we conceded a chance and then from the goalkeeper we conceded a goal. This kind of things happen.”

Maresca not afraid to turn up the heat on players after strong start

It’s a funny one – Maresca is trying to take the pressure off Sanchez individually (quite reasonably), but instead of just putting it down to the “philosophy” or the “system” he instead quite directly mentions Gusto.

Perhaps he just considers Gusto the type of strong character likely to respond well to this sort of thing. In any case, we do like Maresca’s bluntness. It’s a refreshing change from the slightly edge-less Mauricio Pochettino and the endless waffle of Graham Potter.

As long as we’re winning and the players are engaged, they won’t mind him giving it to them straight either.

As for the goalkeeping situation – we’ve said all season that Sanchez will eventually be dropped at least for a bit, and we stand by that.