OhForAGreavsie

That's my situation, and my attitude, exactly. My side of the argument got outvoted. Disappointing, but let's get stuck in to the new circumstance and try to make the best of it.

Who knows what'll happen, but it is the ambition of the Brexiteers to remain members of the Common Market. Under current rules, that would mean a continuation of the freedom to work in any member state. Of course on that score the Brexiteers want to have their cake and to eat it too; they want tariff-free access to the market, but they don't want to accept the free movement of peoples, or the regulations and standards that go with it. For the sake of what will be left of our country, we can only hope that they are right, and that they will be able to negotiate at least some of what they want.

If I had been given the job, I would have watched video of all the players who could realistically do a job for me next season. I would want to make my own judgement about these players, not rely on someone else's. This sounds like obvious common sense to me. It would be deeply arrogant of me to imagine that something which is obvious to me would not also be obvious to Antonio. He has watched the videos.

The new boss must have watched video of all relevant players. If, after doing that, he feels a loan is the right option for Lewis then we must accept that decision. I have not been a big believer in Lewis, but a lot of people tell me that I am wrong about that so I've been trying to be more open-minded about him. To be fair, he did well in Toulon but he needs to make a strong case for himself with his performances next season or time will begin to run out on his Chelsea chances.

Are you getting bored Jay?

It remains to be seen if I am right but I suspect, or should I say hope, that our players have had a chastening lesson and must now realise what Jose, and plenty of us, knew all along; they ain't as good as they think that they are. The newly enlightened squad will not therefore be giving Conte any trouble. If they do then, in the words of The Special One, they must need IQ tests.

Or is it exposing the value of the opinions of those who are doing the overrating?

I like him a lot but you are right, €75m is out of the question. If the numbers we are reading are correct, then it seems selling clubs have taken a look at the new TV deal and lost all sense of reality with their demands for transfer fees. There is only one way to deal with this effectively, just don't pay. If that means walking away from the player then so be it. Premier League clubs as a whole need to take a stand or they will continue to shovel huge proportions of their cash into the pockets of continental clubs. I'm tempted to call those clubs greedy, but they are entitled to ask whatever they want for their players. If English sides are dumb enough to pay those fees then more fool them. Having said that however... I'd be quite surprised if Real have not received acceptable offers for the player and the whole deal, including the resale, has not already been put in place.

I agree with your general point about poor journalism but... One of the reasons I like Koullbaly so much is that I think he looks entirely capable of playing as a DM. If my feeling is right then that makes him the kind of versatile player who is vital to a happy squad. If there has been a Man Utd offer for Koullbaly then maybe that's what Jose has in mind.

This comment implies that you have knowledge that in fact you do not. None of us has any idea what clauses have, or have not, been included in previous contracts. Your comment also implies that you think the addition of such clauses is entirely at the discretion of the selling club. If you think that then you are wrong, if you don't think that then why post such a comment? Why are so many people determined to guess what they think CFC is doing and then blame the club for it irrespective of the fact that the guess is very probably wrong? For example, many posters lambaste the club for being cheap in its transfer dealings last summer, yet we are now told, seemingly reliably, that an offer of €90m plus + 2 players was made to Juventus for Paul Poba. Whatever that is, it ain't cheap. Never mind the facts people, just pour out your bias.

How about Milan Badelj of Fiorentina? Really like his ball retention and distribution both of which are greatly helped by his two-footedness. He is as comfortable with his weaker foot, his left, as all professional footballers should be in my opinion. Of course we may not be flavour of the month down Florence way so any bid would be complicated.

Probably so I suppose.

Agreed.

It was reported that there was such a clause in the KDB contract and that, accordingly, we were paid a fee when he joined City. It has also reported that a similar clause exists in Lukaku's case. Indeed, I remember commenting when someone else posted about it.

I disagree. About what? Everything you say here. So what if the supposed bids are widely quoted? What weight does that give them? The quotes may be accurate but neither you nor I know whether that is the case so to bleat without the facts is nonsensical. I do care what the club pays and have been critical of the club for overpaying and for negotiating poorly. If you don't then you should because it does matter. Right at the start of the Roman era I wrote a piece which was published on the BBC sport website in which I said I had two ambitions for Roman's money. 1) That the boost it gave would help establish Chelsea permanently among the elite clubs, and 2) That by making Chelsea able to outspend the traditional big spenders it would give them a dose of their own medicine and teach them the anticompetitive nature of top level football where every league in the world is dominated by its richest clubs. That their inability to match Chelsea's spending power would scare them into accepting a fairer system. Neither of my ambitions has been achieved but I want to focus on the first one. To be permanent members of the big boys club means becoming independent of Roman and that means sustainable transfer activity. The club's transfer dealings in the summer of 2003 could not have been handled more stupidly if you sat down and planned it. It taught the market than whatever price you can think of is still not high enough and that if you simply held out for your number you'd get it. Sellers have become drunk on that gravy train and weaning them off it is painful. Unless you are prepared to accept the pain however, unless you walk away sometimes, no one will ever take your positions seriously and the market will go on believing they can get silly amounts of money from Chelsea for players they not really desperate to keep anyway. For you the end result is a winning season. For me the end result is perennially successful club. You, unsure whether to snigger at Chelsea football club? Don't make me laugh. I expect most Chelsea fans care about your predicament about as much as you care about their club. You behave like a spoiled toddler. Where's my shiny new toy? I want my new toy. Why haven't you bought my shiny new toy yet? Seems to me that the club needs to treat you to a dose of good parenting to teach you some self discipline.

This is why my long standing feeling about Rom remains unchanged since I formed it within twenty minutes of the first game I saw him play. He has qualities, not quality. I learned later that Rom also has brains so there is no doubt he'll find a way to contribute but no manager of a top level, Champions League contending, side will ever be satisfied with Rom as his first choice striker. Any such manager presented with Rom as his top option, will soon be on the look out for an alternative. That's the prediction I made nearly 5 years ago and I stand by it.

Assuming two offers have been made, how the hell do you know what they were and whether they are smart or otherwise? Your just pay whatever they want idea is such a breathtakingly simple tactic. If only life were so easy.

Yes this behaviour is regularly mentioned in histories, as it should be. The indigenous peoples had been rubbing along with buffalo for millennia and yet, invading Europeans were able to observe great herds of bison stretching as far as the eyes could see across the plains. Unlike what was done by the invading Europeans, the impact of this behaviour was clearly sustainable. That's not the key difference however. Native people's acted either in ignorance or, at worst, laziness. What a contrast with the motivation of the invaders. I would put it a little differently and say that there were many factors contributing to the demise of the indigenous populations but that there was only one cause; the European invasion. Ensuring the success of the invasion is precisely why this deeply selfish method was devised. The invasion had achieved many of its goals but, after two centuries, there were still some hold outs among the native populations. Times had changed. The Europeans no longer were able to cast the indigenous ethnicities as one dimensional bad guys. A gentler form of colonisation by stealth, treaties, had been tried but these proved unequal to the task. They left natives in possession of some highly desirable resources and worse, gave them legal rights to their territory. Many treaties had been broken by the Europeans of course but it was a slow and awkward business. The destruction of the buffalo weakened the native economy fatally and solved the problem. While resistance lingered on into the 1920s, pushing bison to the edge of extinction was, in effect, game over. The invaders achieved in the west of 'their' continent, what a later invading force failed to do in the east of theirs between 1941 and 1945.

Good question and of course it does not. What are the tests of morality in which people of faith score higher than others? I don't know any other than made up ones created and judged by the faithful themselves. They believe themselves to be morally superior because they tell themselves they are morally superior. I'd be interested to know what you understand the phrase 'survival of the fittest' to mean. Your question appears to impute undesirable characteristics to those who survive and then to extrapolate a judgement from it. I'd rather not rely on assumptions however so I hope you'll clarify for me. I raise this because Darwin's phrase, and its implications, are very widely misunderstood or at least misrepresented. Sometimes wilfully so. Some evidence, a massive amount in fact, beats no evidence all day long. Worse, from a creationist point of view, the evidence just keeps piling up. Now that we (clever people, not me) understand the role of what was once termed junk DNA we have a deeper understanding of how evolution happens. There is some work which suggests there may have been changes in rates of decay and perhaps in the speed of light too but not anywhere near enough to reconcile biblical time and geological time. The difference in scale is simply vast. To imagine that the Earth is less than ten-thousand years old, is equivalent to believing that North America is about 2.5 metres wide; to calculate the conversion rate required to make light which has been travelling for 13 billion years before entering the lenses of our instruments, complete the journey on a biblical time scale, is beyond the power of most calculators. What about the intentional and systematic destruction of the buffalo in the full knowledge of its vital economic importance to the indigenous peoples of the continent? Destroy a population's means of living and their lives are destroyed.

I know who the media, fed by a combination of agents working for players, agents working for clubs and sooth-sayers, tell me have been identified as targets by Chelsea but I'm not prepared to judge the club on such scanty evidence.

Nor when he came on against England. He doesn't even look anything special in his youtube clips. Don't see any reason for any fuss about this player.

First let's hope that we'll never know. Hope because none of us want to start the new season with the same squad that finished the last one. If that is what happens, if Antonio has to navigate the season with the same options Jose and Guss worked with; then, and only then, we'll get some clues about whether you are right or not. None of us want Antonio to be handicapped like that.

Roma's stance is that the Belgian is not for sale which is always the position the selling club wants to set up for negotiating purposes. (Unless they are contractually obligated to do otherwise.) Had we gone in with an opening offer of €40m what do you suppose they'd be asking for now? Like it or not the world is real, budgets are finite and the game has to be played.

If he said it, then he fibbed. If he dropped it, then it missed.

As all of the furore blew up over this, it emerged that there may have been long standing doubts about the quality of Eva's work for the club. I know nothing about the truth of that either way so have no opinion on it and what I have to say below takes no account of it. Anyone who has read my general comments knows that I'm a huge Jose Mourinho fan but he was undoubtedly in the wrong about this. He not only behaved badly on the day, he compounded it by behaving stupidly afterward. His actions, which have cost the club a lot of money and bad publicity, have also seen us loose an individual who was a big PR asset. A successful woman in a man's world was always a news story and one that showed Chelsea football club in a positive light. Further, it's not too far fetched to imagine that the incident and its aftermath played a part in driving a wedge between the the manager and his players. It was a bad day and a bad business. Good luck to Eva. I wish her every success.