The Chels

At least the club have decided not to have a pre-season summer tour, which will go some way to helping with the fatigue I guess.

Pedantic much?

Well it was great while it lasted... Ramires has now completed his PL and CL suspensions. Sigh!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2601145/Thibaut-Courtois-not-play-against-Chelsea-Atletico-Madrid.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter LOL the Daily Mail deleted the initial link; they've been saying for ages that Courtois is eligible to play against us (without a fee) - making things up as they go along!

As much as it'd benefit us, anyone else think they'd feel really bad if we were to take Courtois and Costa off Atletico next year? They're the plucky underdogs that virtually every neutral wants to see do well; they're so similar to us in many respects too - strong defensively, a high-pressing and counter-attacking style, a passionate manager, etc. but without the financial backing, which I guess is why they're so much more popular with the neutral! If we don't win the CL I'd love Atletico to.

Flashbacks to the Iniesta goal when Marquinhos got the ball right at the end. Terrifying! Great save though from Cech.

Haha he's deleted that tweet now! Brilliant performance from Luiz.

That's what the spuds thought!

And arguably Hazard too! There definitely seems to be so many no. 10s nowadays and much fewer true wingers.

Chelsea have a 71% win rate in the 21 matches Willian has played this season - compared with 58% in the 12 games when he hasn't. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/26911599)

Not sure about his history - what else has he lied about? The Guardian (one of the most reputable UK newspapers) says Diego Torres is a "respected Spanish journalist", surprisingly!

I think he was the (only) journalist who said Mourinho cried at not getting the United job. He likes to spout shit but still an interesting read lol!

Diego Torres on Mourinho: The presence of a mole at Real Madrid worried Mourinho so much that between 2011 and 2012 he ordered two sweeps of the hotel where the team stayed to search for hidden microphones. The investigations were unsuccessful. The Sheraton Mirasierra was apparently clean. The control of information was another thing that deeply exercised Mourinho; he assigned a group of people to carry out a daily analysis of everything that the media said about him. Every morning Mourinho received a package containing the summary. His day began at 8am in his office at Valdebebas, studying videos, articles and broadcasts. He realised that he and his colleagues were not the only sources of the content, and that certain things that were being published did not exactly project an image of infallibility. He began to suspect that there were leaks in his organisation. The proximity of the Clásico ramped up his sense of suspicion. According to club sources, the growing fear of leaks made Mourinho ask the directors to set up a study of the phone records of players and club employees. Some players were warned about this informally, as it was in their interest to be careful about whom they spoke to on their mobiles. The secrecy, however, did not prevent the boss’s intentions becoming widely known. In fact they were obvious in every training session. At 5pm on 16 April 2011, shortly before Madrid’s home league match against Barcelona, the newspaper Marca reported in its online edition that Madrid would play Pepe in midfield, along with Khedira and Alonso. The team selection was unprecedented: Casillas, Ramos, Albiol, Carvalho, Marcelo, Pepe, Khedira, Alonso, Di María, Ronaldo and Benzema. The 1-1 draw did not help the home team’s title chances but the crowd applauded their team off with a certain relief, Barça’s last couple of visits having ended with scores of 0–2 and 2–6, and filed out of the stadium reasonably content. Not so Mourinho. He waited for the team in the dressing room before issuing a torrent of accusations and insults that distorted his face until he began to sob loudly: “You’re traitors. I asked you not to speak with anyone about the team selection but you’ve betrayed me. It shows that you’re not on my side. You’re sons of bitches. “The only friend I have in this dressing room is Granero . . . and I’m not even sure that I can trust him any more. You’ve left me all on my own. You’re the most treacherous squad I’ve had in my life. Nothing more than sons of bitches.” Casillas did not wait for the outburst to finish. He pretended that nothing was happening, turned around and went to the shower; he was not the only one who ignored the commotion. But Mourinho was filled with such intense emotion that he grabbed a can of Red Bull and hurled it against the wall. It exploded and drops of the sugary energy drink ran down the faces of those nearest to him. Squatting on the ground — some say he was kneeling — he rattled off a further series of insults, then, getting up, he wiped the tears from his face and announced that he was going to speak with Pérez [Real’s president] and Sánchez [a director] because they would be able to find the mole. He promised reprisals and also made an analogy between martial law and football: “If I’m in Vietnam and I see you laugh at a mate, I’d grab a gun with my own hands and kill you. Now it’s you yourselves who have to look for the one that leaked the line-up.” For everyone present it was difficult to work out if what they had seen was a real loss of emotional control or a piece of spontaneous theatre. By improvisation or calculation, Mourinho had ensured that everyone had been on edge. The team had been emotionally stirred up and he had adjusted the final details of his grand tactical plan. All his work, all his energy, the planning of more than nine months, were now focused on one goal: to reach a state of ecstasy in the final of the Copa del Rey in Valencia on 20 April. The days were filled with impassioned talk until finally 20 April arrived. He talked about politics, about nationalism, about the inexorable division between the Castilian and Catalan peoples. He told the players that they had nothing in common with Barça. He knew, he said, because he had lived in Barcelona for many years, and was well aware of the local culture and the education that Catalan children receive. He explained that people like Puyol, Busquets, Xavi and Piqué had been taught from childhood to distance themselves from Spaniards such as Casillas, Ramos and Arbeloa. He insisted that his players were wrong if they thought they had made friendships with the Barça players over their years together in the Spanish national team. The Barça players were not their friends because they took advantage of this supposed friendship by betraying the Madrid players, trying to snatch their prestige from them through their manipulation of the press. They, the Madrid players, were not to participate in this charade any more. They must accept their role as bad guys and should refuse to acknowledge their rivals. Mourinho warned his players that if he saw any of them shaking hands outside of the formalities of the game they would be turning their backs on him — and on their team-mates. Anyone making any such friendly gesture towards the opposition ran the risk of becoming something very much like a traitor. • The Special One: The Dark Side Of José Mourinho by Diego Torres, translated by Pete Jenson (published by HarperSport on April 10 for £12.99). To order for £10.99 including free postage visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call The Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/article4055969.ece

If City lose to Liverpool and draw to Everton, and we beat Liverpool (and win the rest of our games) we'd be champions! Unlikely but not impossible!

1. Azpilicueta 2. Hazard 3. Terry

In the second half we stopped pressing well, probably more due to the yellow cards that Willian and Ramires received than fatigue because those 2 had a long rest before this match. This was quite disappointing from my point of view because I felt your midfielders took too much time and too many risks on the ball and that if we were able to maintain a high-intensity pressing game for the 90 mins, more errors and thereby more chances would've come our way. I'd say this was especially true of Veratti, although in fairness his passing and vision are clearly exceptional and his long passes caused a lot of problems. The whole pointing and laughing at Mourinho incident was rather childish and I think you can see he is clearly not mature enough yet on/off the pitch but he is undoubtedly a very talented young player. Also in reference to your point about Chelsea fans saying PSG = Zlatan or that PSG are rubbish, that's just mostly football banter/trolls. I hope you're not offended because whilst most fans don't really think much of Ligue 1, I believe that most Chelsea fans see PSG as a very good side. And most saw it as a 50/50 - a game that we were capable of winning if our players all performed really well, but equally capable of losing especially because of PSG's quality players and depth - just look at the PSG bench (especially compared to ours: Mikel, Ba, etc. LOL)! Not many of us would have envisioned us being so poor defensively, but PSG really controlled the game in the second half and on the balance of play deserved the win. The third goal might well have killed the tie, but we'll have to see next week. Good luck for the second leg!

I think the defensive line was not angled as it should have been relative to where the ball was being crossed from - it was pretty much in line with the ball. Sky Sports pundits picked up on this as did Mourinho, who in his interview said the line was "not the correct one", and so it is very disappointing that the defence, especially with John Terry in there, could make such a basic error at this level although that was surprisingly the pattern of the game.

I know that our defence has generally been decent this season after the Sunderland defeat, but it is literally impossible to attack in great numbers with them at the back because if we're hit on the counter attack they are far too easily done with a bit of pace and trickery - probably because they're all really slow (except Azpi); consequently the opposition pretty much always seem like scoring from counter attacks. The defence has also been pretty shambolic from set pieces and I fear whenever we concede a corner/FK.

Yes I am a broken record but his technical ability and decision making must rank as one of the worst for all the midfielders left in the CL, if not the worst. Was I the only one surprised not to see Mourinho substitute him?! Not sure whether that's because he thinks Ramires is really good or because the alternatives are worse; I guess we'll see next season but Ramires committed about 3 fouls after his yellow card, and with the best part of 40 mins to go, he was one more foul away from a red card which seemed pretty damn likely given how wreckless he is.

I'd translate that as 'a footballing brain'. Quite a few Chelsea players lack that too, mostly Ramires.

'even'? You do realise Ivanovic is and has been absolutely tosh against teams who hand us the initiative? Perhaps if he were defensively solid then his offensive impotence would be less criticised but he's not. In fact he's been a liability when the going gets tough and in terms of how often we concede from the opposition having the ball on his wing. We saw it yesterday, we saw it against West Brom (home and away), we saw it against Newcastle away, we've seen it on countless occasions and no doubt we'll continue to do so.

Mourinho's definitely right about Ivanovic being consistent - consistently refusing to close down the winger/full back and thereby allowing in crosses from which we've conceded several times this season, consistently crossing the ball beyond everyone in the box and out for an opposition throw-in, and ingeniously deciding to take long range efforts whenever we desperately need a goal. We witnessed the latter both yesterday and against West Brom away. If he thinks Ivanovic is always "fantastic" well then I'm not sure if he's actually noticing these things.

Would they be an improvement on what we currently have? Absolutely. Would we win the league with them and our current style of play? I doubt it. I remember Sky Sports, earlier this year, showing statistics on the conversion rates of the best players in the world. The highest at that time was Diego Costa who had a rate of around 30%. Now if you think about how few chances we actually create in games against more defensively minded teams, it is unlikely such strikers would be scoring readily enough for us to win those games, especially if we concede, and hence it'd be unlikely for us win us the league. And in my opinion the main cause of us not creating enough chances is the lack of creativity and goal threat from the attacking midfielders as well as the lack of proper width and offensive threat from the full backs - things for which we've seen little to no sign of Mourinho wanting to remedy for next season, hence my initial point.

I'm not sure getting in a capable striker that will create space and drag defenders etc. will necessarily alleviate all our problems of breaking down defensive teams. Mourinho had the same problem last year at Real Madrid even with some of the best and most creative players in the world. It's simply not Mourinho's forte, just as Guardiola's sides would likely struggle if they weren't dominating possession: "We need to control the ball. If this is not the case, then we have a problem", he said after drawing to Hoffenheim on Saturday. I don't think it's unfair to say that Mourinho's set us up as a Champions League/big game side rather than one that can dominate the Premier League and its smaller sides.

The media's take on Torres: http://www1.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/teams/chelsea/9240297/chelsea-need-a-striker One of the panelists reckons Torres purposely shoots straight at the keeper because it's preferable to missing the target. LOL wouldn't be surprised if that were the case to be honest.