What if we were in Europe ?

[cosmicway 1,252]

I believe it's impossible to lose the premiership title now.
In football history many almost certain championships were lost because of an unexpected result
But an 8-10 point lead cannot be surrendered. Maybe I 've seen this happening once but no more than once.

Did we benefit from being out of Europe ?
If we were in the CL we 'd be certainly playing today. It's the round of 16 so may this is as far as we could go. But it's a total of eight more difficult matches so far. The same if we were in Europea league, with less strong European opposition.
I don't really remember many teams who were left out of Europe and dominated the home league as a result, but can it be that Chelsea's success this year is because of the lighter program ?
 

[lucio 5,391]

Probably helped , like liverpools title run with suarez , when we had to balance CL semis

[Leif 6,006]

If we were in Europe we'd have been embarrassed there or here in the league by insisting on playing only 1 striker every single game for the season. Key players would lose their legs too early in the season when you consider we've had no truly adequate replacements for Hazard/Pedro/Costa/Kante/Fabregas/Alonso/Moses/Luiz.

We do not have enough quality depth at all in terms of players who'll take the game to a team. Our bench options are reactive more than they are proactive & that's the main thing needing changed.

[BlueLyon 9,359]

On 11/03/2017 at 5:22 PM, Leif said:

If we were in Europe we'd have been embarrassed there or here in the league by insisting on playing only 1 striker every single game for the season. Key players would lose their legs too early in the season when you consider we've had no truly adequate replacements for Hazard/Pedro/Costa/Kante/Fabregas/Alonso/Moses/Luiz.

We do not have enough quality depth at all in terms of players who'll take the game to a team. Our bench options are reactive more than they are proactive & that's the main thing needing changed.

Rotation is a must, but do you see Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, Iniesta (in his best days), Lamps, Drogba etc rotated a lot? They get a game off every now and then, but can easily play several games in row, even if they were played in just a few weeks.

As long they are not injured they played all games except those cup games or if we had super important match after, they got one game rest. But not always.

They play(ed) week in week out. And those are regular players, never mind the likes of Kante, Alonso etc who are running engines. 

The tiredness is just an excuse. Perhaps Alonso and Moses do make a point because their main role is to run up and down every game, cover whole pitch. They are wingbacks and therefore not as common as other positions. So yeah we do need backups for those two and good ones at that. As goes for Kante, Eden, Costa, and everyone else, as long there is no injury, there is no excuse not to play every week and twice per week when CL kicks in. 

This whole tired because no winter break kicked in after english teams started to perform poorly in europe. But english football is played that way for generations and they did just fine not long ago. Unless its because english clubs started to buy players not suited to PL and get injuries and tiredness all the time, and people want us to get even more of those fancy players. 

Rotation is a must, but there must also be first 11 ready to play 90% of games in season. This is how you win titles with strong and consistent 11, not one you rotatate every week. If you have Fabregases and Edens and Costas who are your key players but they cant play 90% of games, you wont win the title, simple as that. Barca, Real, Bayern have consistent first 11. 

Poor form, injuries, giving chance to youngsters/non regulars are reason to rotate, not tiredness. 31 year old Ronaldo can play every every match if he is fit as does every other real, Barca, Bayern, psg, atletico,...player. Unless we talk about the guys like Xabi Alonso who obviously cant play every game at top level because of their age.

Nba players play every two days, PL footballers are top professionals and there is no excuse to be tired. If they cant handle the PL rhytm coupled with european games, then they have no place in PL clubs. 

We need to improve our bench options as you said, indeed. In quality and quantity. But certainly not to replace our key players in half of games so they dont get tired.