Ossie the King

When Frank was here we'd say that was arriving perfectly timed to slot home the ball. Halcyon days of old eh?

I think when everything is going right, he's a great player but you've seen his body language in matches this year. When has he really looked up for it? Spurs away is the exception I think, when he was the guy who dragged the team forward but I haven't seen much of it since. You think he's not a bottler and that he came into this season in the best possible condition he could be and I respect that, but I disagree.

Can't you just give him some credit? For fuck's sake, he's a Chelsea player. The ease with which some people slag the players, the fans in the ground and even some supporters on here is just strange.

Fantastically worked goal. Mikel started that move perfectly, Cesc played in a perfect ball and someone slotted it in. Anyone see who it was?

His amazing physicality covers his lack of experience, but when he gets more games under his belt he could be genuinely top class. Love the bloke.

He doesn't have many other options. This squad is worryingly thin and Hiddink can't fix that overnight. No coach can.

He hasn't looked up for the fight in how many months? His body language has been atrocious, he came back fat and now he's looking a bit injury-prone. That's not slagging him, that's genuine concern based on honest appraisal.

Head gone, bottle gone, leg gone. Such a shame after last season.

Best put me on ignore then please. I'll do the same which is a shame since you made an excellent post elsewhere but you seem to have an issue with English supporters. Best wishes for the new year. In other news it looks like Hazard's reinjured his bottle muscle. He's got more requests for substitutions than he has goals this year. Maybe if he spent more time on keeping himself in top condition.

The supporters are in superb voice though. Absolutely top class fellas who deserve so much better than they're getting.

Too early to judge but Mikel for Matic strikes me as a decision one would make a few years ago, which makes sense if a manager hadn't taken and interest in us for a few years. It worries me that we've hired a coach who has done nothing of note since he left us 6 years ago. Hopefully his decision pays off. It's bold, but not in the way those who wanted Jose out were hoping.

I get that thinking, I do. I think the idea of it being a Gulag is a bit hysterical though. Petr chose to be a footballer, just like you or I chose our careers and just like you or I he understood that to maximise his earnings he'd probably have to move abroad. He's known that ever since he left the Czech Republic to move to France. I love the man, but again he's a grown man. These are things we have to deal with as adults. As for Jose, there are various reports that he didn't want him to go to Arsenal and that Roman sanctioned the deal. Based on everything we know about Jose and Wenger's relationship, and Jose's relationship with winning I tend to believe those reports. That brings me to your third point that Arsenal have been lacking a leader and a top-class keeper for a decade. Every pundit and supporter knew this, and we gifted them both for what is at best a fair price. He's been the difference for them in a number of matches, most recently yesterday and he's made them proper contenders and absolutely no-one should be surprised by that. Maybe if we'd been contenders too it wouldn't matter, but because the board have fucked up so badly this past summer and gave up on the title before a ball had been kicked then it wouldn't matter. But there's every chance that Arsenal will win the title and whilst we can talk about being classy to Pete and not forcing him to work in a Gulag/spend a few years in a beautiful city like Paris (oh the horror, someone phone The Hague) I think it would've been classier for Roman to think about his fellow Chelsea supporters/customers and not put them through the shitshow that would be Arsenal winning the title. But I also think it would be a great way for Roman to pile more shit on Jose. He says Wenger is a 'Specialist in Failure' so Roman does what he can to help him win the title. But I do understand your points. I just disagree and for me the focus isn't on what's best for Pete, but what's best for this club and it's supporters going forward. Always has been, always will be.

There's a difference between not keeping a player and letting a great player make a despised team into a title contender against the coach's wishes. Roman fucked Jose and this club with that move but he doesn't work with Arsenal fans or know what that rivalry is because he's not one of us.

The beauty of Mourinho's style of play, predominately in his first spell here, was that there was no definitive style of play. We could overpower teams, stop teams and outplay teams. In his second spell that was the same but as we went into the title run we closed ourselves down almost completely. With the lead we'd built up and the brilliance of Hazard that didn't matter too much but when it came to starting this season it was clear we needed something extra. We needed something to jumpstart everything and that never arrived. We needed reinforcements and instead the board weakened the squad. Nobody at the club, including the manager, seemed to know how to get us going and I think that comes from a top-down lack of ambition. Now I don't think we'll ever play like Barca, but I don't know if I want us to. I enjoyed us being the 'anti-Barca'. I enjoyed us being a team who could soak up pressure and then hit teams on the break. There seems to be this myth that if Jose had unlimited resources he'd build a team to park the bus. I don't think that. I think he'd build a team to play like the one's who beat Arsenal 6-0 or Swansea 5-0 but that takes it's toll on the players. So now the board and those 'Jose Out' fans will build their hopes up for Pep and end up disappointed and we're once again looking for a style of play but without the spending power to paper over the cracks. We aren't winning the league for a while.

Wow, you guys really didn't like Jose did you. Maybe taking it a bit far though aren't we? I mean the guy did win us the league and in his first time here laid the foundations for other managers to have success. Drogba and Terry, the guys you talk about having as assistants, talk about him in glowing terms and would undoubtably be influenced by him.

Waking Roman up so he changes his ways is the most important thing.

Fair enough then. If those were your expectations then I can understand why you were happy with the board weakening the squad and giving up on the title. Unfortunately we hired a coach who bases his existence on winning. We should've hired someone like Rodgers, a man who plays young players and can't win the league. Who knows, you may well get your wish.

He'd play lots of games if we get Brendan Rodgers - probably at right wing-back.

No, it's not an excuse but it's a contributing factor and isn't that what we're looking at? In fact Arsenal's net spend in Mourinho's time here has actually exceeded our's. That doesn't mean that we should have been performing how we were but there were (and are) glaring holes in the squad and we haven't actually spent the money to address it. Isn't that a cause for concern for Chelsea supporters? Are you ok with us winning the league and then saying, thats it? We won the league, now let's weaken the squad and actually sell a world-class goalkeeper to a rival against the wishes of the coach? What we saw this summer was a coach (who underperformed this season) undermined by the owner and failed by the board. NO-ONE did their job this summer and we've sold arguably the only one of them who knew anything about football. The future of this club is not good. We have idiots in charge and an owner who spent on average just £8 million net more in transfer fees this summer than Crystal Palace. We aren't getting Pep either.

Pellegrini has never had less than DOUBLE the average net spend of Mourinho each season to back him though. In the same time he's been at City, they've spent £170 million NET more than us. I agree. But to get there we need better people running the club.

I think this summer both teams had the ambition of finishing top four. I'm actually quite surprised at the level of investment the board/Roman made into the club. If you factor in Cuadrado's loan being a transfer of around £15 million that will end up going through this summer but effectively already having occurred, then that figure drops even further.

Just looking at net spends of teams (fun, fun, fun). In Mourinho's time here we've spent £89 million. That's roughly £30 million a season. In the same time Palace have spent £66 million. That's just £8 million less per season, and this year we spent that extra £8 million on Papy Djidyoutouchme and Michael Hector. These are two similarly ambitioned teams.

It's not a decisive one, but when you begin to lower your expectations it can snowball and become something you can't control. It was, but it was also scintillating at times. Arsenal just beat a poor Newcastle team 1-0 today having beaten City convincingly a week ago. At the end of the season both will be worth three points and if they win the league no-one will give a shit. You might say it doesn't cut it but I hope no-one with a vested interest in youth development thinks that because it's a major issue. You can't develop a player under one style (and numerous managers) then loan him out to Rotherham and expect consistency of development. Equally whilst it's fair to hope for a fairytale development story of a player that a manager takes a punt on, the margins of success and failure at the top of the game don't always allow for that. Every match counts and matches are won in the fringes of matches, so playing young players does have an immediate impact. Looking at the issue of our squad, according to the source I just looked at (transferleague) we spent just £30 million Net per season in Jose's time here. City spent almost triple that, United double and Arsenal even spent more than us. Experts will say you need to add two world class players to the squad to retain the title, broadly speaking. In the summer we made just TWO ADDITIONS to the squad. That's; Papy Djilobdji Kenedy The other players were replacements Begovic for Cech Rahman for Luis Pedro for Cuadrado Falcao for Drogba And I'd argue that only Pedro is actually a marked improvement over the player he replaced, whereas every other one is a downgrade. This summer, we undermined the coach by strengthening a rival and made his squad weaker. That's on top of spending £170 MILLION less than his closest rival in his time at the club. That might now be an excuse for him being just above the relegation zone but I don't know what the board were expecting of him. They established that there was no ambition at this club, so why on Earth shouldn't we be relegation candidates?

And yet we're going to build a team around players like Hazard, players who rarely show any bottle.

Nailed Jose being undermined. Apparently it did have ramifications.