Maresca, the head coach who was appointed 18 months ago, parted company with Chelsea on New Year’s Day.<\/p>\n
They then lost defender Wesley Fofana to a virus, while first-choice goalkeeper Robert Sanchez was deemed not ready to play after injury.<\/p>\n
Caretaker boss McFarlane had never led a senior men’s match, and this first opportunity came against Guardiola, widely regarded as the best manager in the world, having overseen 1,011 games before this one and won a stack of trophies.<\/p>\n
There would have been concern about whether Chelsea would be competitive at Etihad Stadium given such a disparity in experience between the men calling the shots from pitchside.<\/p>\n
Chelsea quickly put those concerns to bed, pressing City high, causing havoc at set-pieces and remaining solid.<\/p>\n
That was until they conceded during a poor spell at the end of the first half.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, supported by the unavailable Sanchez, Marc Cucurella, Levi Colwill and Moises Caicedo – who travelled to show solidarity – Chelsea presented as a united, competitive group capable of taking on City.<\/p>\n
Of course, they were also found lacking at times, particularly with mistakes from Badiashile that led to the goal, and they were creatively short in the first half.<\/p>\n
Then substitute Delap gave them a lift when he came on after the interval, pushing his team up the pitch, including one moment he created for himself in arguably his best league display since joining Chelsea.<\/p>\n
Yet it was Fernandez who popped up with the equaliser – converting a low cross from the right for his seventh goal of the season, making him the joint-leading scorer for the Blues this season.<\/p>\n
It was a worthy moment after an impressive effort from the squad and goes to show there is life left in Chelsea’s season despite a chaotic episode that saw Maresca seemingly fall out with the hierarchy and ultimately leave.<\/p>\n
Maresca’s successor may turn out to be Strasbourg manager Liam Rosenior.<\/p>\n
The new boss will inherit a team who sit fifth in the Premier League, just three points behind fourth-placed Liverpool, with opportunities to lead this group in the FA Cup third round, Carabao Cup semi-final and the Champions League.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maresca, the head coach who was appointed 18 months ago, parted company with Chelsea on New Year’s Day.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-392490","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\/392490","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=392490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}