"He's cold and I'm fire. It mixes well!" Noni Madueke said of his partnership with Cole Palmer after the pair starred in Chelsea's 6-2 win at Wolverhampton Wanderers.
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Madueke scored a 14-minute hat-trick at Molineux, with all three goals assisted by his team-mate, Palmer. It's only the fifth time that has happened in a Premier League match.
"Me and Cole have been playing together for years," Madueke told Chelsea's official website.
"We know each other's games inside out. When we're on, it's difficult for any team to combat that."
⚽️⚽️⚽️ @NoniMadueke_ pic.twitter.com/mHggMZfygU
— Premier League (@premierleague) August 25, 2024
As well as being indebted to Palmer, Madueke also praised his head coach, Enzo Maresca, adding: "It's credit to my manager. He's given us a platform to perform. He makes the game easy for me as a winger.
"Everyone saw what he did at Leicester last season. He's mad about his approach, the details. I'm happy he's got his first Premier League win for Chelsea."
Madueke apologises for social-media post
Madueke's hat-trick grabbed the headlines but before the match he was a big talking point, too, after he posted an Instagram story being critical of Wolverhampton.
"I want to apologise to anyone I offended," he said.
"It's a human mistake. It wasn't meant to be out on my socials. I'm sure Wolverhampton's a lovely town! I expected the boos!"
Maresca: Madueke was fantastic
"I didn't know before the game about Noni's social post," Maresca said.
"I can judge Noni’s performance, which was fantastic. Not only second half, even first half the first 10 or 15 minutes he was always one-v-one creating something.
"Since day one I said he’s the kind of winger I really like. He is working very good with us, but the best thing today from Noni was not the hat-trick, it was the way he defended for 90 minutes the counter-attacks.
"That showed the right mentality I am asking from the players. It was for Noni, and it was for Christopher Nkunku who played five minutes. Joao Felix was the same. If we want to build something, first of all you need the right mentality, and from all of them it was very good."
Maresca also praised "special" Palmer and revealed what he said in his half-time team talk that led to his team scoring FOUR second-half goals.
"I’ve known Cole for four or five years," he said. "I had him for one season at City with the second team, then with the first team.
"He’s a special player, a special guy, a special person. I’m not surprised at all by the goals he scored last year, the goal he scored today, the assists. He is a top player."
On half-time team talk: "I said [at half-time] in a delicate way we needed to be more accurate. We started the first 15 minutes very good. We scored a goal and we had two or three more chances. Then we started to lose easy balls, and when you lose easy balls you concede counter-attacks, set-pieces, and you lose confidence. This happened the other day against Servette [in the UEFA Conference League playoffs].
"I just said to play the way we want to play we need to be a little bit more accurate. We can lose the ball if they press us very intensely, but we cannot lose the ball by giving it away by making the wrong decision. The difference between the first half and second half was being more accurate."
