MrExcalibur100

The technical level of some of our players just makes you crawl up with laughter sometimes. wow.

Costa is laughably bad so far.

Costa should have held his run there to make it a simpler pass.

And Verratti. We need a serious improvement on both him and Matic for away games like this were we need some control from the middle of the pitch.

What the fuck is Fabregas doing in this game!? Pretty pathetic from him so far. No wonder he's nowhere near the likes of Xavi, Iniesta, Modric etc

Fabregas our so-called midfield "controller" totally anonymous.

Standard. We play like shit away from home.

Pretty dire. Like a ghost most of the game.

I completely disagree with you that Hazard's runs off the ball are comparable to Willian's. Willian rarely even does that. Hazard has been making a lot of runs off the ball that he could possibly do without occupying the same lanes Costa does. If anything, he' making TOO MANY runs off the ball. Pedro and Hazard have scored the same amount of goals this season but Pedro has also started in the cup and is a known goal-scoring winger while Hazard's primary strength is not his goal-scoring. Anyway, i'm not going to argue the point since it's not something seriously worth discussing especially since Hazard's performance today isn't something worth discussing. Watch Hazard very closely from now on off the ball. We can't expect him to be our primary ball carrier then also make more runs than he needs to when we have Costa and Pedro for that.

He was making a lot of runs off the ball and has been doing that for 2 years now. I'm not sure what you're talking about my good friend. Also, he improved quite a lot in the 2nd half as expected when we started playing football. The problem is when we don't play football, Hazard struggles to touch the ball in dangerous areas and we struggle to play well away from home.

He's currently behind a lot of players in the centreback pecking order. He looked well out of his depth today both in defending and worse with the ball at his feet. He's not going to improve a lot in the latter and there's no point trying to persist when we have better solutions. He only marginally improved when we stopped pumping long balls and tried to play some football in the 2nd half. Sell.

Yeah he was shocking. This squad needs some serious upgrades if we want to avoid embarrasment in the CL next season.

Finally

At least we're trying to keep the ball on the floor in this half. We might soon score.

Zouma is actually shocking. Seriously Kimpembe is miles ahead of him now.

Amazingly, Conte makes no changes. If we score it will be from some set-piece or individual brilliance. Mad not to try and change something after that 1st half.

It is but half of us on here want to talk about Costa and Hazard as if that's the main issue when it clearly is not.

Zouma for Batshuayi. We can't build attacks, Costa can't win any headers in the air. They've rendered us useless. Conte.please.do.it.now. I can't endure another half like that. That was the biggest pile of rubbish we've played this season.

It's seems it's only me and you that have noticed our biggest problem in this game. It just goes to show that even a championship team press can render non-ball playing centrebacks hopeless.

Fair enough but why pick him out when the whole team is doing just that? Can't you see the problem is our build up play from the back (or lack therof) which is making us look so shit?

I think we need to change the system. This team is useless playing a 3-4-3 if we aren't playing our regular personnel. Please just go 4-4-2 in the 2nd half. Sub out Zouma and bring on Batshuayi. We have no hope of building anything from the back with Terry, Zouma and Fabregas (Looking for hollywood passes)

Painful to watch.

Where's the space, where's the cohesion in the way we're playing, yeah he's a great dribbler but he can't just pick up the ball and dribble past a set defense. This isn't a video game.

Right now I have more faith in Ake and Christiensen than in Zouma. He gets so massively overrated by some Chelsea fans and he doesn't suit this system at all. Right now he's probably the 3rd of 4th best U-23 French centre back. He needs to be sold quickly.

Seriously, I'm trying not to go over board but we're quickly de-generating into a glorified counter-attacking team. We've been utterly shit away from home for a long time now.