1-1 draw against Arsenal,<\/a> Caicedo will miss three matches – at Leeds on Wednesday, and against Bournemouth and Everton.<\/p>\nSpeaking on Tuesday, Maresca gave Caicedo the same billing as star attacker Cole Palmer.<\/p>\n
“We are a better team with Cole, we are a better team with Moi,” said Maresca.<\/p>\n
Caicedo has been a key player for the Blues so far this season, and only a late return from South America prevented him from starting their 2-0 victory against Burnley after the November international break.<\/p>\n
Asked by BBC Sport about still winning while resting his midfield lynchpin, Maresca said: “I won’t do it any more. This is the last time!”<\/p>\n
He may have been joking, but there is perhaps some truth behind his words. <\/p>\n
Caicedo won both the club’s players’ player and fans’ player of the season awards in 2024-25, and is regarded by his manager as one of the two best defensive midfielders in the world, alongside Manchester City’s Rodri.<\/p>\n
Statistics from football data provider Opta back up that judgement.<\/p>\n
No midfielder in Europe’s top five leagues has made more tackles (28) or interceptions (18) this season than Caicedo. <\/p>\n
Those 28 tackles represent 23% of Chelsea’s overall figure – the second-highest ratio Opta have on record for a player in a season since 2006-07.<\/p>\n
Caicedo makes more tackles and wins a higher percentage of duels (59%) than Arsenal’s Declan Rice and Liverpool’s Ryan Gravenberch – both often considered among the league’s best midfielders. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca certainly knows the importance of Moises Caicedo. Maresca has picked the Ecuadorian midfielder in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-324751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}