According to the Chelsea boss, it\u2019s nothing to do with a first team or second team, it\u2019s all about the opposition and the game plan:<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, to be honest [it doesn\u2019t get harder to leave him out when he does well].\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause if he doesn\u2019t play, Pedro Neto plays wide in his position. And Pedro is good. And we are happy with Pedro. We try just to defend the game plan, we use 11 players. Tonight we decided, probably in the most difficult game of the season, we decided to play with Estevao. So I\u2019m not a manager that I don\u2019t allow players to play minutes. It\u2019s just the game plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe game plan always decides the first 11. It\u2019s the reason why we changed so much. And you say that we are unpredictable. But it\u2019s the game plan. The game plan defines the first 11. Now the next one is Arsenal. The game plan is not always good, sometimes it\u2019s also wrong. It defines the first 11. And Estevao, when the game plan is for him, he\u2019s going to play. And for sure he\u2019s going to play many games because he\u2019s very good.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pressure will continue to grow on Maresca to use Estevao more considering he plays like this, but in reality, as the manager said, it\u2019s all going well with his current usage, so why mess with that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to the Chelsea boss, it\u2019s nothing to do with a first team or second team, it\u2019s all about the opposition and the game plan: \u201cNo, to be honest [it doesn\u2019t get harder to leave him out when he does well].\u201d \u201cBecause if he doesn\u2019t play, Pedro Neto plays wide in his position. And Pedro …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-epl-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/GettyImages-2248439371-750x500-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11444,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11442\/revisions\/11444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evutisblog.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}