Enzo Maresca wants his Chelsea team to be serious.
Serious in how they approach matches, whatever standard the opposition, and serious in how they control them, too, chipping away each week at their basketball tendencies in favour of something a little more careful and secure.
Serious, above all, about shifting the perception of this era’s Chelsea as being anything but.
In that mission, Nicolas Jackson has emerged as an unlikely standard-bearer. Last season’s player of comic petulance, of obvious raw talent, yes, but infuriating inconsistency and a gunsight askew, has, it seems, developed a killer’s cold heart.
It is difficult to get your head around, like strolling into a school reunion to find the old class clown now works in nuclear defence. But on an afternoon when, somehow, despite their obvious superiority, Chelsea flirted with mishap, Jackson’s ruthless edge came to the fore. And not for the first time this season, either. The opener in this 2-1 victory over a limited Leicester City made it seven in 12 league matches for the forward this term, combined with an increasingly refined all-round contribution that suggests the transformation is real.
His goal was a wonderful merger of habits old and new. There was the hassling and harrying that was the 23-year-old’s obvious quality from his first step through the Cobham door, the unsettling physicality that had Wout Faes swinging wildly at successive failed clearances, like a man trying to fell an oak tree with a pitching wedge.
But then, when the ball eventually broke via Enzo Fernandez, there was the quality to match the effort, a sublime deft lift over the defender and a glorious finish into the far corner off the outside of the boot. Two perfect touches to chisel out the only feasible route to goal.
It should have been more comfortable for Maresca on his first return to the King Power, and would have been had others followed Jackson’s lead. Noni Madueke steered wide of an open goal on the volley from the striker’s cross, when he should have made it 2-0 going into half-time. The same player inadvertently blocked on the line when Cole Palmer seemingly could not miss after another Jackson effort had been parried.
Fernandez, excellent on his first league start in five, eventually established a cushion, heading in after Jackson had again been denied. And still it became chaotic, substitute Romeo Lavia clumsy and Jordan Ayew pulling one back from the penalty spot deep into stoppage time. Such was Leicester’s ineptness though, that in the time that remained they could not even manufacture a decent hoofed ball.
So not exactly the clinical, business-class performance that Maresca will have wanted, nor one that fit with Jackson’s professional display. But on the back of the international break, with a rejigged team and a wild gale blowing, it was job done all the same.
