The Conference League group stage is done and no one is likely to miss it quite as much as Marc Guiu.
Chelsea signed off for what will be a near three-month European hiatus with a perfect sixth win in a row, inspired to a 5-1 victory over Shamrock Rovers by an opportunistic first-half hat-trick from the young Spanish forward.
As this phase of the competition has wound down, Guiu has wound up, scoring five times in a week now after his brace in Kazakhstan last Thursday. Throw in one of the eight in the earlier mauling of FC Noah and suddenly the 18-year-old finds himself as the competition’s top scorer. Not bad going for a lad who couldn’t get a start even in Chelsea’s ‘B’ team when it began.
The presence of two fellow 18-year-olds in Chelsea’s lineup here in recently promoted academy graduates Tyrique George and Josh Acheampong served to highlight the accelerated state of the summer signing’s development.
While that pair are precocious in talent but boyish in build, Guiu, poached from Barcelona, already looks a man grown and his disruptive presence played a part in some catastrophically bad visiting defending.
The opener came from Renato Veiga’s nothing ball in behind. The chasing George had given up on it, but Darragh Burns and Leon Pohls decided that neither of them could, the former nodding past his confused goalkeeper and leaving Guiu to head gratefully home.
The second was similarly bad, but this time Dan Cleary with the blunder and Guiu with a little more work to do, skipping round Pohls and steering in from a tight angle. The hat-trick goal, at least, was entirely of Chelsea’s own craft, Noni Madueke’s cross finished with a dominant, looping header.
A seventh consecutive victory across competitions puts the gloss on a table-topping campaign for Chelsea, who had booked their place among the direct qualifiers for the last 16 even before tonight. (No other team finished with a 100 per cent record but, in any case, a goal difference of 21 probably would have settled the tie).
The result is that Maresca’s side do not play another European game until early March and how the Italian now manages Guiu’s progress will be intriguing to follow.
There will no doubt be loan interest in January on the strength of this fine winter run, but Maresca’s leaning with the best young talents appears to be to keep them close, with a temporary exit for Acheampong ruled out as soon as he had signed a new long-term contract this week.
Guiu will start, surely, in the FA Cup third round tie with Morecambe to come next month but he remains behind Nicolas Jackson and Christopher Nkunku in the Premier League, where he has not played since a cameo against Manchester City on the opening day of the season.
All the signs, though, are that the teenager has come a long way even since then and that, physically as much as anything, he is ready to play a part if required.
