Kostas

That's more like it!

Would appreciate a Veetle/Sopcast link.

Because people are simply sick of him, so probably the first.

Lampard starts, I expect ~10 pages of dross once again.

Kalou probably just made the bench, had Drogba been fine he would have to watch the game from the stands.

Damn that looks interesting, looks like I'm going to skip gym again. I HATE Saturday games.

Not sure if that is 100% correct. A horrible assumption but I doubt it's too far from the truth..

A part of me just died.

Smart boy

Yup and slating is way more popular at the moment.

A few pre-season games with disastrous goalkeepers maybe a couple 10 min sub appearances and a PL start where he was far from terrible? Am I missing something?

No wonder it's hard to keep up with the forums the way I used to. Still an impressive achievement for TC.

I (may simply want to) believe that Kakuta's natural talent was so big that even two bad seasons aren't enough to completely ruin his potential. Moreover the contract he signed last winter will keep him with us for quite a while and possibly more than he will deserve so even if he doesn't live up to the expectations this season he will get another chance. Besides the fans will always find a way to blame the CFC board

I looked around a couple of Bolton forums, granted they don't know much about Kakuta but they're more excited about getting N'Gog than Gael :mellow:

I now think I've been hard on people who have criticized Mikel in the past.

I'm not sure how strong the impact of the increasing number of Spanish on our football and our club's philosophy will be but having 2 people who are able to communicate with the 2 most sought-after football markets is certainly an improvement over our former continental duo.

Doubt it, don't think he should either.

I feel this is much more true about McEachran than Sturridge. Sturridge actually looked lively and promising in City and in the few games he got under Ancelotti thus the calls for him to be played. McEachran's hype on the other hand, took off way before he had a game for the first team where he was "promising". This is a fairly popular image on imageboards and I found it by typing the actor's name and keywords like "new", "must" etc.

Speaking about that, since I once again haven't done my homework by missing the transfer thread and skipping pages in the player thread, do we know how much he's on?

Pretty much. As far as I'm concerned there should be a website similar to the famous www.howlonguntilbushisgone.com with a few tweaks and the target date being June 30 2012.

Sounds like an anomaly. Kalou in 10/11 was certainly not as bad as he was in 09/10, his worst season at Chelsea equal only to his truly horrific first season. I expect the current feeling won't last and that once a new thread opens to assess his ability it will once again be TX and a few others against all those striving to "defend" a Chelsea player.

Anyone predicting Kalou to start over Sturridge either has an agenda or is blindly retarded to the fact that Sturridge was suspended.

Just because Lukaku and Courtois are highly rated as teenagers doesn't mean that they are going to start games in 6 years for one of the top clubs in Europe, if that's what we believe we'll be. Luiz has already made enough mistakes to gain some critics and create some doubt while Mata has so far started a grand total of 0 games for Chelsea thus we don't have the slightest idea what his Chelsea future holds. It is as simple as comparing other top clubs in the biggest leagues in Europe to their squads in 2005-2006, need I mention how many different Barcelonas and Manchester Uniteds we've seen in those years? As Beast pointed out we don't even know our line-up for this season and frankly I've not had confidence in my knowledge of the ability of all our players since last summer. Until I figure the answer to that question, and that's going to take more than a couple of games since I'm not that eager to cast out and conceder any player who joined us before 09/10 (bar Cech and Ivanovic) washed-up, finished, done etc despite the highly annoying current fad I can't seriously talk about the future of players who are mostly of unknown quality.