Mauricio Pochettino made a mistake taking off Madueke instead of Sterling – BBC pundit agrees

Mauricio Pochettino’s decision on Tuesday night to take off Noni Madueke rather than Raheem Sterling after an hour has been criticised widely by fans.

Stewart Downing said the same in the 5Live commentary of the game, saying he “couldn’t get my head around” Sterling coming off when Madueke had been Chelsea’s “most threatening player.”

Madueke is quite different to Sterling, in that he tends to do quite few things but create a lot of danger with them. We saw him dash past players and make openings, whereas Sterling is much more scattershot, trying lots of things with lots failing and a couple coming off.

We know Sterling is the senior man here and has a great record of goal contributions, but it did feel like Madueke’s individual dribbling might be more likely to make something out of nothing, which was what we needed.

We weren’t getting the ball to areas that Sterling was going to regularly cause danger in. So keeping Madueke was maybe the right choice.