Viper22

You're right, i've got confused. Guarentee we will wear it at some point though.

We'll have to wear it when we play Everton if their away kit is anything like last year. Their home kit was blue and their away kit was yellow and blue. Because they're morons. I don't like it. I like the colour combinations but it just looks ugly to me. As other people have said, without the weird spiky things it would have looked great.

Thought you should be reminded of this post.... Money solves everything mate.

It's U21 from this January. I got who was still U21 from the Premier League website, so I guess they all fit the criteria.

You're allowed 17 over 21 non-HG players in your squad. So: 1 - Cech 2 - Schwarzer 3 - Ivanovic 4 - Luis 5 - Romeu 6 - Ramires 7 - Torres 8 - Hazard 9 - Oscar 10 - Mikel 11 - Schurrle 12 - Costa 13 - Willian 14 - Azpilicueta 15 - Courtois 16 - Matic So that leaves us room for 1 more. And so 6 HG players: 18 - Fabregas 19 - Terry 20 - Cahill 21 - Bertrand 22 - Moses So room for 1 more there too. Salah, MVG, Lukaku, Ake, Blackman and Zouma all count as U21 btw. To my knowledge and using the Premier League website, that's my understanding of it.

Miranda isn't better than Cahill. Cahill has been awesome lately and as good as Miranda is I just don't think he's THAT good.

3-5-2 will be the next big formation I reckon. The formation fashion goes around in cycles it seems: 3-5-2, 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 4-2-3-1, 3-5-2 etc.

The irony that I read this topic on Tapatalk .

Barring any player departures (looking at Lukaku, Cech, Bertrand Ramires & Mikel), it will probably be: 1 - Courtois, Azpi, JT, Cahill, Luis, Matic, Fabregas, Hazard, Oscar, Willian, Costa. 2 - Cech, Ivan, Zouma, Chalobah, Bertrand, Mikel, MVG, Salah, Schurrle, Ramires, Lukaku. Schwarzer, Torres. Mou likes his essential 2 squads so there's a replacement in every position plus an extra GK and striker to make 24 like you said. If any of the aforementioned players left then we could just replace them with similar players, hopefully young English ones if possible.

Jesus. Everyone flying off the handle here a little bit. Tbh with the deals we've done over the last few transfer windows and especially this one I will trust the board in whatever decision they make. I admit I will be dubious if we have Costa/Torres/Didier but if that's what Jose believes he needs then I will trust him. Trust in Jose, trust in the board people.

Not to nitpick as I agree with the rest of what you said, but £35M isn't cheap. It's about average. We paid that for Hazard and you wouldn't say that was cheap would you? And Hazard is a better player than Sanchez, or at least as good. £27M for Fabregas is cheap, £35M isn't.

Piazon and McEachren might still make it into our first team? There's still time. The only players who we invested time and money into who had a realistic chance but didn't make it and were sold from our youth were Kakuta, Bruma and Mancienne. You might as well point at Chalobah and say we failed with him too because he's not in our first team yet, even though he could still be within a year. And the comment about Hutch has already been dealt with well by TOPTB.

Bertrand's next port of call will be sticking his fingers in his ears and going "LALALALALALALALALA I can't hear you!" whenever Jose tries to talk to him by the sounds of it.

Always saw Bertrand as a pretty level headed guy who would understand that he is a decent squad player and nothing more and would accept playing around 10 games a season for us barring catastrophic LB injuries. It's a role in the squad that someone has to do, and he gave every indication up until now that he was happy doing it. If he's going to have a little bitch fit about it now all of a sudden well... we sell him for as much as we can get. He can go and play at a mid table club and get the game time that he seems to value so highly at the detriment of winning trophies or earning a lot of money. It all depends what he wants out of his career I guess. The weird thing is this has come out of nowhere, it's like he thinks that he was good enough to start for us after Cole left. If he does then he's super delusional, even the staunchest Bertrand fan on this forums couldn't say that he's good enough to start for us if we have aspirations of winning the league, that's just crazy. Tbh i'd rather keep him as the 4th choice full back, behind Luis, Azpi and Ivan. But if he wants to leave then it won't be much of a loss, Ake or Kane could fill that spot just as well.

I'm sure this has been said by someone before but this would be the best formation if we started with a 4-2-3-1: And this one for a 4-3-3: You can then rotate Willian and Schurrle easily, Lukaku/Bamford/Torres with Costa for the striker role, Ivan in at either CB or RB (with Azpi moving to LB if needed), Zouma in at CB, Mikel in instead of Matic and Ramires/MVG in instead of Fabregas or Oscar. Of course that's with our current crop of players, if we get someone else (Pogba, Vidal, Cavani, etc.) it would change things a bit.

Against anyone in the PL we'd get shafted on the counter if we played Fab and Oscar in the middle. They'd have their 2 forwards and 2 wingers against our back 4. 4 1vs1s that over 90mins we'd lose too many of. We might be better going forwards but we'd concede 3/4 goals a game easy. Tactical suicide to have no pure holding mid to cover the back 4 in this day and age.

That's true, but I see Khedira as a more B2B player than pure holding mid. He hasn't got the stamina of Ramires but he's gives away infinite less fouls and is infinitely smarter on the ball. So i'd keep Mikel as the back up to Matic as the pure holding mid and have 2 or 3 of Fabregas/MVG/Ramires/Khedira to play alongside.

Only if Ramires is off. Tbh we've done some great business this transfer window, if it's true about Jose talking to Khedira then it might be best to play with the current team for this year, and then sell whoever is the biggest liability during the year between Mikel, Ramires & MVG and get Khedira ( ) in on a free. The transfer fee and freed up wages will allow us to pay him however much he's asking without it denting our transfer or wage budget.

Possibly. Would have to see the interview transcript. Unfortunately i'm far too lazy to seek it out. FPL is up and i'm constructing my team .

A bad habit, that.

We got a mention at least. That surely means that there has at least been an enquiry, or Khedira has made noises about possibly wanting to come here?

Mata is very good, if you can't see that then you're either being deliberately stupid or not watching him. He was world class while at Chelsea when he fitted into the system, and towards the end of last season (his first 6 months at a new club, a new club that was floundering in the mid-table and a useless manager) he started to recapture some of the form he had shown for Chelsea before. I'm glad he went, because as good a player as he is, he needs to be in a system that suits him. Which doesn't make him the perfect player to have in your squad admittedly, because even if you play with that system then he won't play well in any plan B. But to suggest he isn't a good player is just plain stupid. I have high hopes for Oscar, we just need to wait and see how he does next season. If he plays badly again then he can't have any excuses, but I reckon he'll play well and prove Jose's faith was well founded. Jose is rarely wrong after all. And the dig at how someone watches Chelsea matches being different to how you do might possibly be the childish thing i've ever read. Just.... stop.

This particular jigsaw is coming together very nicely now

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/blackpool-cancel-pre-season-trip-spain-3864096 Poor Blackpool.... Not sure whether to laugh or not.

Or maybe Ba is already on his way?