Why does Maresca make so few changes?

If there is one thing that football fans have in common from the very top of the Champions League to the lowest reaches of the amateur game, it is moaning about substitutions.

Look at any manager who has ever been sacked, and you will find complaints about their use of changes: too many, too few, too early, too late, too defensive, too reckless.

Perhaps it is because so much of what a manager does is obscure. Fans are hardly going to have an opinion on their training sessions or team talks when they can't see them. But subs are something concrete they can understand and are the most direct form of control the coach has of events on the pitch once the game has started.

So it should be no surprise that the first real issue Chelsea fans have with Enzo Maresca following his excellent start to life at Stamford Bridge are with his in-game changes. As the season has gone on, Maresca has used fewer and fewer of them - a baffling strategy given we have entered the period where players start to get tired and rest and rotation becomes more important than ever.

Chelsea make fewer changes than most teams in the Premier League and they make them later. Given the trend of the last few weeks, they will surely soon be last in the league in both. Considering the sheer quality on our bench, the decisions become even more puzzling.

Maresca has had to address this stance a few times already and is quickly growing tired of it, as a snappy response to a journalist after Saturday's draw with Crystal Palace showed.

He says he does not want to make change for change's sake - which just denies the evidence of recent results and data suggesting his team suffers late in games.

Find more from Will Faulks at Chelsea News