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Ossie the King

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Everything posted by Ossie the King

  1. Do you mean an 'attacking philosophy' or a philosophy of how we should attack. We may not have the former but we certainly have the latter. It's not hatred but frustration spilling over into resentment (?) or a sense of betrayal. Let me try and explain but first I'll say this - Eden Hazard is the single most skilful player I've seen at this club. My own experience only goes back to the mid-90s but we're still talking Hoddle, Gullit, Robben and obviously Zola. Above all of them though, I think Eden has the most natural talent. But natural talent only gets you so far and everything I've seen and heard about Eden makes me think he doesn't have that drive that someone like Franco or Ronaldo had/has. You hear all the stories of him being the first off the training pitch, the first in the canteen, the first out the door and you see him come back from his summer break overweight every single year. Now neither of them are particularly unusual, but when you have a reputation for being a slow starter it does make you wonder. What makes those feelings come to the surface is when you don't perform on the pitch. Now I'll say now, he won us the league almost single-handedly towards the end of last season. He was the difference maker in so many games but he hasn't got close to that and it's December so when you add all of that up, you do start to wonder about a player. Then to top it off, you have the Leicester game. Now I'm not a doctor and I don't know what issue he had, and I'll be the first to say that he deserves better protection from refs. But it wasn't a good look and after everything else you're going to get some people getting annoyed. But what I will say is that he won't be the best player in the world until he wants to be. He's supposedly a bit of a homebody off the pitch, content to live with his young family and be very good at what he does. 99% of people would do exactly the same, but he could be in the top 1% of the top 1%.
  2. And that movement is evident in a lot of play....except for Costa. I have no idea what went wrong with him but his movement has been atrocious in every regard this season. I get that some people want to paint Jose as being pragmatic to the point of not wanting to score goals, but I don't think anyone can have his level of success without knowing how to do things at both ends of the pitch. Maybe he 'closed us down' too early last season so we coasted to the title (certainly holds some merit) but we simply didn't get going this season and a lot of that has to do with us not improving the squad in the summer. No team can stand still off the pitch and expect to get better on it. The club stood still in the summer and Jose never had the tools necessary to mount a title defence. It shouldn't have gotten this bad though.
  3. You could probably argue that now, but would you have said the same after any of the 200 games as a professional footballer before the age of 23? Personally I don't think he's as good defensively as Azpi is on his worst day, but I can understand why some people are bitter about him leaving. I'm still not over us selling Jon Harley. Drat. I should just keep things simple in future to avoid mistooks.
  4. He's the only choice I can see right now not being a kick in the face to the supporters. Everyone loves a bit of Guus.
  5. Rahman is I believe 4 years younger than Bertrand was when we sold him isn't he? He was viewed as being a player with potential wasn't he? Was Bertrand in the same bracket? I get your point and I would love to have Bertrand around as a backup player getting 15-20 games a season, but he wanted more than that which is a good thing. It simply didn't align with our plans for him and we got a decent amount of money out of it. Ivanovic got in that team too and I've seen people in this thread say he isn't good enough so I think you've hung yourself with your own petard there. I'd have loved to have seen him stick around but he wanted more than he could have got here with Dave and Brana rightfully (in my opinion) ahead of him.
  6. Cheers mate. Honestly I've been reading this thread for a while and it became a bit of an echo chamber of about 6 people slagging him off so at least you'll get a few fresh voices saying new things over the next few days. On the one hand the board have done a tremendous job over the last few years and I'm tremendously excited about the new stadium. But this summer was a major failure. We sold a great goalkeeper to a major rival against the manager's wishes. We signed a player he clearly didn't yearn for whilst making an absolute pig's ear of the John Stones deal (seriously, whoever 'masterminded' that deal did just about everything wrong). For every one of Jose's mistakes made after the season kicked off, the board made at least the same amount in the summer. Now they've managed to sack our best manager of all time again and pissed off a lot of Chelsea supporters, some of whom they need to keep very onside in the next 12 months. Utter shambles.
  7. I don't know if anyone does. Maybe we'll get a manager in who wants to play Papy Djilobodgi. That would be a treat. Or maybe we'll sign some world-class players in January, rather than doing the business like most clubs do in the summer. I don't know if people talking about player power have a point or not, but whether intentionally or not they did get Jose sacked to some degree. Matic's form has been nowhere near where it was. Hazard got off to one of his 'late starts' (as if saying it happens every year makes it right and has nothing to do with him always looking overweight in August). Costa completely went off the boil. JT finally seems to be showing his age and wasn't properly replaced. Just so much going wrong and I don't think Jose should take all of the blame.
  8. Ryan is a good player and probably good enough, but he wasn't good enough to start regularly (or as regularly as he'd have liked) and made it very clear that he wanted to go. Would've been lovely for him to stay but there wasn't a solution that worked for both parties. Even now, with our aspirations to be a top European club I don't think he'd have been quite good enough despite how much I like him.
  9. So registered to vent. Got a thousand thoughts swirling around my head but in all honesty I'm devastated. Firstly, whilst it was nice to see the club back him for so long they should've done more earlier. In May we were champions. The day after we needed to start improving the squad and the stark truth is that we didn't. You HAVE to improve when you win the league. You NEED at least two world class players, probably three to just regain the title without even thinking about Europe. The club failed Jose in that regard but he didn't once mention this or criticise any of Marina, Michael or Roman. Then they sold Cech against his wishes and bring in Djilobodji on transfer deadline day. Man City's owners backed a manager they want to replace in the summer - we can't back the one manager every single fan of this club loved. That to me is on the club and why we're in this position. But Jose also failed to adapt and that is on him. He was too loyal to some players and he was too volatile at times, starting with the first game of the season. But the guy has had a tough year personally and for that (and the title) he deserves a bit of leeway. Honestly, there's so much that's occurred this year that it's tough to put down into coherent sentences but I honestly worry about where this club is heading, what the atmosphere will be like going forward and who the club actually thinks it is now. I've never felt such a disconnect with the club itself (i.e. the board, the owner, the custodians) as I do right now. Jose wasn't bigger than Chelsea, but he was a massive part of it's identity for the last decade even when Carlo or anyone else was in charge. Guus would be one of the few palatable choices out there but even then, what's he supposed to do? The midfield is Swiss cheese at times, the defence simply isn't good enough and Costa isn't the striker he was last season. Jose was right when he said that he'd been betrayed, but by everyone except the fans. He'd said some things that upset me last year but we've grown closer (in my opinion) in adversity this year than maybe ever before. That will have massive ramifications I think going forward and the fans (in this case the CPO) have a massive voice right now. Actually I can concisely put down my thoughts after all - fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.
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