Arsenal legend Paul Merson was “impressed” by Sunderland as they beat Chelsea on Saturday, while he urged the Blues to bring in some experience.
Chelsea went ahead after only four minutes on Saturday with Alejandro opening the scoring but Wilson Isidor soon cancelled out that effort on 22 minutes.
With the game seemingly heading for a draw, Chemsdine Talbi popped up in the third minute of second-half injury time to give Sunderland all three points.
The result saw Chelsea drop down to eighth in the table ahead of Sunday’s fixtures and Merson was disappointed by what Marc Guiu offered up front for the Blues.
Merson told Sky Sports: “Well impressed with Sunderland today, I wasn’t with Chelsea.
“I thought they’d struggle. They need Delap back badly, they need a focal point.
“Guiu played up front and I think he touched the ball nine, ten times. You can’t do that in a team that are supposed to be dominating the ball.
“Chelsea ran out of ideas. They had winger after winger but half of them don’t go past anyone. Joao Pedro looked lost as a number ten. They struggled and were pretty poor.”
Merson added: “The team is too young. The oldest player there is 23, 24?
“When you get a young team, you’re up and down, they have wingers who are very inconsistent. [Pedro] Neto on his day will be outstanding, the next minute…
“There’s no 7/10s all the way through, it’s either eight, nine or fives. They can’t win the Premier League like that.
“They need a little bit of experience in there. They miss Thiago Silva with his experience and that’s their problem.
“They’re just going to be up and down, up and down. Hopefully they can get top four, but they’ve got to be better than that.”
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When asked about Joao Pedro’s performance, Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca said: “I think Joao is not training every day because he’s managing a little bit himself from the injury problem.
“Moi [Caicedo] is exactly the same, Enzo [Fernandez] is exactly the same. We have four or five players that unfortunately, because of some problems, they cannot work every day and they try to make the effort to play the game.
“So Joao in some games has been better, today he struggled a little bit. But today I think overall all the players struggled today, so it’s not just about Joao.”
When asked about his side’s display in general, Maresca continued: “I think in general we were not good enough. When you are not good enough in the Premier League, we know that the consequence can be the bad one.
“The second goal we conceded, I said already many times, when you are not able to win, it’s important that you don’t lose.
“But even with that, it’s not a transition because a transition when you are open or it’s 1v1, it’s just one long ball in behind. We are 2v1 with the two central defenders and we didn’t defend properly.
“The first goal came from a throw. Again, it’s difficult to deal because they bring six, seven, eight players inside the box, so it’s difficult. But overall, I think we were not good enough.”
