Maresca’s first two games in charge of the Blues ended with a 2-2 draw with Wrexham and a 4-1 loss to Celtic but at no point was he panicking. In a business such as football, results are important. Of course they are. But the Italian has continually stressed it is more important that he is seeing the players take aspects of his tactical philosophy from training sessions into these matches as he prepares his team for the 2024/25 season.

For anyone who has been watching Chelsea’s open training sessions in the USA, they will see very clear patterns of play and some important principles being passed on to the players.

And in the first half against Club America on Wednesday night, many of those were clearly evident as the Blues ran riot. Christopher Nkunku’s early penalty and Marc Guiu’s header meant we went into half-time 2-0 up but it could have been so many more.

Club America improved after the break but Chelsea still managed to add a third goal, through Noni Madueke’s penalty, and were deserved winners against the Mexican champions.

Maresca said: ‘I am very happy. I said the other day when we lost that the result is always important because we are Chelsea but the main focus for us at the moment has to be to analyse or to judge the performance and see how we have improved.

‘From my personal perspective, from Wrexham, to Celtic, to today, we continue to improve. This is the most important thing.

‘We struggled against Wrexham for many reasons, we struggled against Celtic for many reasons but there were many important things which we improved [against Celtic]. And today, we continued that line, which is the most important thing.

‘Since we started, what we do in training has to happen in the game. Against Wrexham, we prepared something and it happened. Against Celtic, the same and again today, the same thing. That is the most important thing.’

There were several positive stories to come out of our third pre-season match.

Maresca was able to hand maiden Blues appearances to new signings Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Filip Jorgensen, who only signed for the club yesterday.

Midfielder Enzo Fernandez was also back in the squad and like Jorgensen, came off the substitutes bench at half-time.

When asked about Fernandez’s performance, Maresca said: ‘You can see that he is a bit behind. In terms of his physical conditioning, he was a bit slow. He had one or two sessions with us so 45 minutes today was just another chance to give him another session.

‘These kinds of games, we also use them like a training session and for Enzo, today was a very good training session.’

You can hear more from Maresca in the coming hours at the official Chelsea website and app.