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In a quick turn of events, Chelsea and Enzo Maresca have parted ways.

The Blues’ form has certainly declined in recent weeks, and they have gone from being talked up as “a finished product and title contender” by ESPN’s Bill Connolly to languishing in fifth place, a massive 15 points off 1st.

The West Londoners only won twice in December, with one of those victories coming against League One Cardiff City in the Carabao Cup. It has certainly been an underwhelming month, to say the least.

It now seems that the club’s directors could decide to part ways with the Italian and might well have a replacement lined up.

Chelsea identify potential Maresca replacement

Reports this week regarding Maresca’s Chelsea future intensified. On Thursday morning it was announced that the Italian would not see in any of 2026 with the team. Both player and club reportedly agreed that a parting of the ways would be beneficial.

As it happens, they have already made plans which will set into motion the act of finding his replacement.

That manager could well be more closely linked to the club than you might expect.

According to a report from journalist Si Phillips, the most likely replacement is Strasbourg manager Liam Rosenior, who Phillips says is the ‘only’ person he can see getting the job.

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Those claims have been backed up by many, including Sky Sports’ Kaveh Solhekol who reports that “Rosenior is one of a handful of candidates who will be considered as a replacement.” Solhekol expects Chelsea “to announce a new head coach in a matter of days.”

French side Strasbourg are a fellow BlueCo side, so it would make acquiring the Englishman a lot easier because of the strong link between the two clubs.

It is unclear how much Chelsea would have to pay to appoint Rosenior, but because of their relationship with Strasbourg, the required compensation might well be less.

Why Rosenior would be a good hire for Chelsea

Former Hull City manager Rosenior has certainly left a huge impression on Ligue 1 outfit Strasbourg during his time at the club.

Last term, he guided them to seventh in the league, helping them reach the Conference League, a competition which Chelsea, of course, are the holders of.

Overall, his record at Le Racing is impressive. In 62 matches across all competitions, the London-born manager has guided his side to 32 wins, at a win rate of 51.61%, and has lost on just 17 occasions. It is easy to see why he was described as “one of the brightest young managers” by Hull fan and podcast host Ant Northgraves.

There is a real emphasis on possession-based football under Rosenior. This season, his side have averaged 52.6% possession per 90 minutes, which ranks them joint 31st amongst all of Europe’s big five leagues, and seventh for clubs in the top flight of France.

This aligns well with Chelsea’s philosophy. Phillips explained that the two-time European champions have “a club-wide ideology to play possession-based football only.” The fact that Rosenior has turned Strasbourg into a possession-dominant side bodes well in that sense.

Someone who might profit from the appointment of Rosenior is Chelsea’s talisman, Cole Palmer. It has been a frustrating campaign for the Wythenshawe-born superstar, who has struggled with injury and has only played eight Premier League games.

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His impact this season has certainly not been felt as much as in previous campaigns due to the interruptions. Palmer has three goals across all competitions, and Maresca has not given him a full 90 minutes since his return to fitness. That has not gone down well with Blues fans.

Rosenior’s potential appointment could change this. There is no doubt about it, Palmer is one of the best players in the Premier League in the final third. Last term, he averaged 2.45 key passes per 90 minutes, and it was higher in 2023/24, at 2.48 each game.

Palmer key stats in 2 full PL seasons for Chelsea

Stat (per 90)

2023/24

2024/25

Key passes

2.48

2.45

Passes into final third

4.68

4.6

Goals and assists

1.13

0.65

Shot-creating actions

5.57

5.7

Goal-creating actions

0.89

0.42

Stats from FBref

Looking at those numbers, it is easy to see how the England star would benefit from Rosenior’s possession-based football. Get him on the ball enough and make him the pivotal figure in attack, and he will produce.

Under Mauricio Pochettino, he was averaging 60 touches per game, but that regressed to just 52 under Maresca. Chelsea’s potential new manager must get that stat higher to have the best impact.

Not just an intelligent manager, but “one of the best coaches ever” on the training pitch in the words of pundit Clinton Morrison, it might not just be Palmer who benefits.

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Abahani Limited got back to winning ways in style with a 107-run win over Prime Bank Cricket Club at the BKSP-3 ground. A fantastic top-order performance got them to 305 in 49.2 overs before Shuvagata Hom’s 5-wicket haul shut down Prime Bank.Shadman Islam struck his maiden List-A century, making 103 off 100 balls with nine fours and three sixes and added 119 runs for the first-wicket with Liton Das, who contributed with 65 off 63 balls that had four boundaries and three sixes.Shadman followed it up with a 101-run second wicket stand with Saif Hassan who also slammed three sixes and two fours in his 53-ball 51. Ariful Haque and Al-Amin Hossain took three wickets each but could not restrict Abahani from breaching the 300-run mark.Shuvagata then took the five-for while Manan Sharma picked up two wickets as Prime Bank were bowled out for 198 runs in 44.5 overs. Salman Hossain was unbeaten on 61 off 75 balls.Avishek Mitra’s 95 propelled Mohammedan Sporting Club to a six-wicket win over Prime Doleshwar Sporting Club at the Fatullah Cricket Stadium. The opener struck three fours and two sixes in his 134-ball anchor that lasted till the 41st over. in their chase of 229.He added 57 for the first wicket with Rony Talukdar and 52 for the second wicket with Shamsur Rahman, before adding another 55 with Raqibul Hasan who remained unbeaten on 49 off 60 balls.Earlier, Sajedul Islam and Charith Asalanka took three wickets each as Prime Doleshwar were restricted to 228 for 9 in 50 overs. Abdul Mazid top scored with 50 off 73 balls.Legends of Rupganj bounced back from their ordinary performance against Mohammedan Sporting Club in the previous encounter, as they crushed Victoria Sporting Club by six wickets at the BKSP-4 ground in Savar.Batting first, the hapless Victoria side were bowled out for 155 in 45.3 overs. Uttam Sarkar top scored with 35 while Rupganj’s Pakistani recruit Raza Ali Dar took three wickets with his left-arm spin. Mosharraf Hossain and Mohammad Sharif took two wickets each.Rupganj reached their target in 45.3 overs with Pinak Ghosh leading them with a 110-ball 62. Victoria used nine bowlers but could take only four wickets.

Paras Dogra’s unbeaten 97 got Himachal Pradesh to 259 and then Vishal Bhatia took four wickets to bowl out Jharkhand 30 runs short of target in Visakhapatnam.Half-centuries from Sandeep Sharma and Manoj Sharma laid the platform for Paras’ 104-ball innings which included six fours and two sixes. Paras and Manvinder Bisla added 53 for the fourth wicket but the middle order didn’t push home the advantage. The last six wickets fell for 65 runs. But in the end the target set by Himachal was more than enough.Ishank Jaggi (55) led Jharkhand’s chase along with Saurabh Tiwary (40) and the two added 72 together before Jaggi was caught and bowled by Sarandeep Singh. When Tiwary was caught behind off Bhatia, Jharkhand needed 138 off 131 balls to win. Bhatia then removed Amir Hashmi and Santosh Lal in two consecutive overs and Jharkhand required 102 off 83 balls with four wickets in hand. The last four only managed to add 71 more.In the second match in Visakhapatnam, Tamil Nadu scored a six-wicket win over Madhya Pradesh after they bowled them out for 189 and chased the target with more than eight overs left.Shadab Khan top scored for MP with 39 and his 53-run stand with Murtaza Ali was the only one of any significance in the innings. Tamil Nadu gave eight of their players a chance to bowl and C Ganapathy, R Ashwin and S Badrinath picked up two wickets each. L Balaji, returning to competitive cricket after one and a half years, took 1 for 31 in his 7.2 overs.Badrinath hit an unbeaten 79 and added 62 with S Vidyut to take Tamil Nadu to an easy win.

Dwayne Bravo says his fellow Trinidadian Brian Lara can still help West Indies even though is no longer with them on the field © Getty Images

Dwayne Bravo is looking to put the advice he has received from Brian Lara to good use when the third Test against England gets under way at Old Trafford on Thursday. Lara could do nothing as his former team-mates slumped to a record innings and 283-run defeat in the second Test at Headingley.”Just last [Monday] night I was on the phone with Brian,” Bravo said. “He called me, having arrived in London. He is aware of everything that is going on. He still has a big interest in the team’s performance. At Lord’s [where West Indies drew the first Test] he was in the dressing room among the guys.”It is very nice to know that even after he called it a day he still has enough time to make himself available to the younger players. Brian has a special place in the heart of West Indian cricket and has a lot to offer still. Anything going wrong with our batters, whether it be Chris Gayle or Devon Smith, if he can’t get hold of them, he will pass it on to me.”West Indies technique against the swinging ball looked inadequate at Headingley where the cold conditions were far removed from those in the Caribbean, although they weren’t helped by being without Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan. But Bravo, whose second-innings 52 at Headingley was a rare West Indies highlight, is hoping for better weather at Old Trafford, where three years ago he struck 77 and took six wickets in the first innings of a Test.”The weather is looking fine so far,” he said. “The pitch looks hard and that is our kind of cricket, where the ball is coming on to the bat and there is bounce for the fast bowlers.”

Simon Jones (right) with the Wisden Cricketer of the Year award © Getty Images

Simon Jones is all set to return to competitive cricket for the first time since recovering from his knee injury, when his county side Glamorgan take on Northamptonshire in a pre-season friendly on Thursday.Jones, one of the recipients of the prestigious at the Wisden 2006 launch on Tuesday, said he was raring to go after pulling out of the winter tour of India midway.”We’ve got a friendly at Northampton, and I’m fit and hoping to go there,” Jones told Sportinglife.com. “I’ve done a lot of hard work over the winter and I’m really looking forward to the first match.”Jones, one of the star performers during last year’s Ashes series, has missed plenty of cricket due to his recurring injury problems. He pulled out of the Ashes decider at The Oval last September due to an ankle injury, which subsequently ruled him out of the Pakistan tour. His participation in the India tour was unfortunately cut short after playing the first warm-up game at Mumbai, when he twisted his knee during a net session at Nagpur before the first Test.

John Buchanan has been thinking long-term during the training camp in Brisbane this week © Getty Images

John Buchanan, whose coaching contract expires in October, is confident of a renewal that will keep him in charge until after the World Cup. Buchanan, 52, told The Age discussions with Cricket Australia for a two-year deal were advanced and there were enough challenges to keep the world champions fresh after the Ashes tour.The Australians have been in camp this week tentatively planning for the England Tests and one-day tournaments, but they have also focussed beyond the trip, which starts tomorrow. “We’ve specifically avoided concentrating too much on this series because it’s a long tour,” Buchanan told the paper. “There will be time when we get there to really put our minds and training to what we’re going to do in England.”Buchanan said the side could still improve and use its skills more consistently, especially with its catching. “We can introduce some more tactics along the way that we’ve at least talked about and it’s now a case of how we implement those,” he said. “If myself or a player or the team believes that there aren’t new challenges and there aren’t things we can improve significantly in our games, then it’s time to move on.”The World Cup is already on Buchanan’s mind and he said he was hopeful of securing a place at the event following his discussions with Cricket Australia. “They’ve been good negotiations so far and I’m hopeful we’ll reach a conclusion on that as soon as we can,” he said. “With that in mind I’ve produced a blueprint for the World Cup 2007.”

Stuart Law’s bid to become a non-overseas player with Lancashire looks likely to fail in the short term.Law is applying for British citizenship – his wife comes from Liverpool – but he has been told that the process could take as long as two years. That won’t cause any problems this summer, but in 2005 counties will only be able to employ one overseas player each, meaning that if Law isn’t qualified by that time then Lancashire could face a tricky decision.Law scored 1820 first-class runs at an average of 91.00 for Lancashire last summer. He plays his final match in Australia this week, for Queensland against New South Wales at the SCG.

At Lancashire’s annual general meeting, Jim Cumbes, the county’s chief executive, said that the feasibility study on a potential move from Old Trafford to a purpose-built stadium in east Manchester will be completed by the end of May.

MELBOURNE, March 7 AAP – Whatever happened to Brad Hodge during the last drinks break at the MCG here today, it certainly worked.The out-of-form Victorian No.4 transformed from a slow 16 to a blazing 68 in the hour before stumps as his side reached 4-245 t the close of the second day of the Pura Cup match against Western AustraliaWhether it was a refreshing drink, a message from the dressing room or just a decision on Hodge’s part to come out of his shell, he suddenly looked more like the batsman judged last summer’s Pura Cup player of the year.Jon Moss was also unbeaten on 18, with Victoria needing another 31 runs to take the first-innings points it desperately needs.Victoria and New South Wales had the same number of points going into their games this week, but the Blues will play Queensland in the Cup final if they stay deadlocked on Sunday because NSW has more outright wins.Victoria must have a better result over the next two days than the Blues.The home side will build a decent lead over WA tomorrow if Hodge can compile the decent score that has eluded him this campaign.After scoring four Cup centuries last summer, Hodge’s highest score so far this season is 96 last November against South Australia.WA resumed this morning at 9-262 and leg-spinner Cameron White soon wrapped up the innings to finish with 6-66.Openers Jason Arnberger (54) and Matthew Mott (61) had an opening stand of 107, but they were out in the space of 12 runs when they played poor shots and were caught.Left-arm spinner Beau Casson had 2-86, removing Mott and also No.3 Matthew Elliott for 25, but came in for some punishment from Hodge as the Victorian gained confidence.Hodge and Moss had put on 48 for the fifth wicket and the Bushrangers will expect them to take the score past the first-innings target on a slow, even pitch.

After a year during which his public appearances have been marked by tears and various degrees of contrition, Hansie Cronje betrayed anger for the first time on Tuesday at a press conference in which he claimed to have answered all outstanding queries about his financial affairs, satisfied the conditions of his indemnity against criminal prosecution and threatened to institute legal action against those who leaked and published an incomplete forensic audit into his affairs.On Wednesday Cronje’s legal team will meet Bulelani Ngcuka in an attempt to convince the South African Director of Public Prosecutions that he has met the terms of the indemnity deal struck before last year King commission hearings. Cronje’s case will be based on a 13-page document which, he says, provides explanations for some 120 transactions queried by forensic auditors Deloitte Touche.He will also argue that details of some 19 bank accounts and eight properties, three of which he still owns, were provided by him to officials of the King commission before and during last June’s hearings.All of this was made public on Tuesday in response to a Sunday Telegraph report, written by Neil Manthorp, in which details of what can only be described as a provisional forensic audit were listed.Cronje, it has to be said, was extremely plausible at his press conference. He was also clearly angry. "I’m sorry I’ve had a go at you," he apologised to the journalists, "but I’m cross."He denied ever having obstructed the auditors in their inquiry and instead criticised both Deloitte Touche and the King commission for wasting millions of rands.Cronje claimed that the audit report, dated November 5 last year, had only been received at the offices of his lawyer Leslie Sackstein on February 3, a Saturday. He said he had seen the report for the first time on February 5. On February 9 Justice Edwin King closed his commission down.According to Cronje, the only contact the auditors had with himself or his legal advisers was to set up a meeting on December 21. He said that the auditors cancelled the meeting on the evening of December 20.A figure of R10,5-million was mentioned in the Sunday Telegraph as the total amount of deposits made into his various accounts. Cronje has clearly spent a great deal of time working through these deposits. Some, he said, were salary desposits made by the United Cricket Board and, before that, the Free State Cricket Union. He produced a document from Ian Smith, the then Director of Finance at the UCB, which confirmed Cronje’s salary payments.The mysterious "Magda", who was featured in the Sunday Telegraph story as making a number of deposits, is identified as a woman who then worked for Clifford Green, the UCB’s legal adviser. Green also acted as Cronje’s agent for some time.Other deposits, said Cronje, simply reflected inter-account transfers as he moved money from one account to a higher interest-bearing accounts.For all bar two transactions Cronje had an explanation. According to Sackstein, these gaps existed because Cronje’s banks had not yet been able to track down the transactions in their archives.Most particularly, though, Cronje reserved his wrath for Neil Manthorp, the author of the Sunday Telegraph article. Sackstein said he intended to lay charges under the South African Commissions Act against Manthorp and the unnamed officials who provided a copy of the audit report. The maximum penalty for disclosing and publishing commission documents without permission, said Sacktstein, is a six-month jail sentence.Cronje suggested on Tuesday that Manthorp had launched a personal campaign against him as a result of an argument between the two during South Africa’s tour of Australia in 1998. In fairness to Manthorp, his story as published on Sunday, makes no mention of "secret" accounts and "undisclosed" dealings. These were written into the story in woefully inept interpretations of the original in South Africa’s Monday morning papers.For all Cronje’s bullishness, however, he did not touch upon any dealings involving a NatWest account held by him. In their report, the auditors say: "For example, the NatWest account bank statements would help us identify foreign earnings as mentioned by Mr Cronje in his statement of 15 June 2000 that his NaWest account was used for `my foreign earnings’."Cronje, who attend his grandmother’s funeral on Tuesday afternoon, could not be contacted in the evening for clarification.And also on Tuesday evening, Sipho Ngwema, a spokesman for the South African DPP, continued to insist that Cronje had not been given an assurance of indemnity at the King commission. He said that the meeting between the DPP and Cronje’s lawyers on Wednesday was to allow the Cronje team to "make representations".

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	Mathew Inness has had a summer to remember in his final season of Pura Cup cricket © Getty Images

Mathew Inness retired in style by bowling Western Australia to a 222-run victory over Tasmania at the WACA. The Tigers began the day still 336 short of their target with seven wickets in hand, but any thoughts of a dashing chase ended when they lost 3 for 5 in five overs before lunch.Inness picked up two of those wickets, George Bailey caught behind for 33 and Tim Paine bowled for 5, and he finished the job by trapping Tim Macdonald lbw to secure the win. It capped off a remarkable year for Inness, who collected 4 for 44 to take his season tally to 40 wickets at 20.12. Only Doug Bollinger and Ashley Noffke had more prolific campaigns than Inness, who was overlooked for every match last summer.After Paine departed Tasmania were 6 for 161 and Luke Butterworth’s 79, which included four sixes, was the only bright spot as the defending champions ended their season in fourth place. Although Inness’ seven wickets were the most from any bowler during the game it was another retiree, Justin Langer, who was named Man of the Match for his first-innings 131.