Enzo Maresca rues ‘six minutes that changed the game’ in failed experiment against Flamengo

By participating in the Club World Cup, Chelsea have had to, in effect, sacrifice a large part of the upcoming preseason. However, despite the insistence that we’re taking this competition as seriously as possible, it would appear that we’re not averse to do a bit of experimenting at the same time, to help fill that gap in preparations for next season.Alas, last night’s experiment backfired quite emphatically in always sunny Philadelphia. We haven’t seen such a momentous collapse from the team in some time, going from a game that was solidly in-hand and under control, to conceding twice in the span of six minutes in nearly identical ways. Nicolas Jackson’s second ridiculous red card in his last four appearances then effectively ended the match, despite plenty of time left on the clock.Maresca didn’t elaborate on what the exact nature of his experiment may have been, but we had Reece James playing in a three-man midfield alongside Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández, while Cole Palmer was back on the right flank where he had so much success last season. That’s certainly not a bad idea on paper; in practice, the execution was lacking greatly however. Experiments can fail in many different ways.“[Those were] six minutes that completely changed the dynamic of the game. I think, until their first goal, we had started the second half much better, but then two goals in two minutes and the red card changed the dynamic of the game.”“In the last two days, we tried something completely different. We played in a different structure today to prepare for next season and have more options. The plan was quite good for an hour, but then we conceded the goal, and the second one, and then we had the red card. In the end, with us down to ten men, they deserved to win the game.”-Enzo Maresca; source: Chelsea FCAt the end of the day, this defeat won’t prevent us from reaching the knockout rounds of this competition — we do have to at least draw against ES Tunis on Tuesday — though it will likely give us a tougher (first) matchup in Bayern Munich rather than Benfica or Boca Juniors. It was never going to be easy either way.But hopefully we’ve learned some lessons that needed to be learned.