Liam Delap’s injury return for Chelsea ended in disastrous fashion as the striker was shown a red card soon after coming off the subs bench.
The summer signing has missed the last six weeks with a hamstring injury, but he returned against Wolves in the Carabao Cup fourth round, only to be shown two yellow cards in the space of seven minutes on his return.
A pull-back on Yerson Mosquera was the reason for his first caution, with another yellow coming shortly after a foul on Emmanuel Agbadou.
As a result, he will be suspended for this weekend’s Premier League clash against rivals Tottenham. Thankfully for Delap, though, his dismissal did not really impact the result.
Chelsea flew into the lead with Andrey Santos, Tyrique George and Estevao Willian all on-target in the first half.
Tolu Arokodare and David Moller Wolfe brought the Midlands side back into proceedings – before Enzo Maresca made several changes which included the introduction of Delap.
He left the pitch just 26 minutes after coming on having been shown two quick-fire and needless yellow cards. Jamie Gittens scored a fourth for Chelsea soon after before Wolfe’s second set up a nervy conclusion. The Blues held on to secure a spot in the quarter-finals, though.
While that is one positive, Maresca will be impacted by Delap’s decisions this weekend, as he will be suspended which likely puts more pressure on Joao Pedro to feature despite concerns over his fitness. He also admitted that Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo were dealing with injuries.
“Probably they are players that need to be protected for many reasons,” he said. “So probably tomorrow we’ll see. But yeah, Enzo, Moises, Joao, they are all players that for different reasons we need to protect them.
Maresca was asked about potentially winning the Carabao Cup during his press conference on Tuesday with the Chelsea boss making his feelings clear.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said when asked if the deeper Chelsea go in the competition, the more hungry they are to win it. “As you said, it’s three games away from the final – so we need to have a desire to play for that. As we said many times, we need to go game-by-game.
“Now the first one is Wolves. We need to be focused on that. And then hopefully winning the game we can think about the next one.”
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