Naked Mole Rat

I think the commentator just praised Lukaku's "good touch" lol.

Nice!

The FA attempting to be consistent and maintain dignity in its own right. Awwwwwww, so cute!

This reminds me of Kaka and Digao...

Yeah. There are so many different ways in which a player can make an assist in football without intending to assist a teammate to score: taking a corner or a free kick, earning a penalty, having your shot parried away to your teammate, causing an own goal to be scored, etc. General stats like goals and assists are absolutely useless for analysis in football. EDIT: taking corners or free kicks IS usually done to help a teammate score, but you don't need to be a good team player to make assists that way.

Robben has 23 assists in 62 Bundesliga games. Better assist to game ratio than Marin's. Don't tell me Robben isn't selfish.

I don't think so. Selfish players like him are usually not very consistent.

No, I don't own the game unfortunately. I only play when I'm over at my friend's.

atdhenet.tv has a channel reserved for Chelsea TV as well.

Great goal today. He's shown some great awareness to wait for Ramires' support, then to get in the box for a return pass, and then to take a quick shot on goal before the defender could do anything. How old is he, 18?

Yep. And FIFA's actually slower than real football, too, which makes things even worse. It's actually a lot more playable with Pro angle and Fast tempo, but I'm hoping they'll fix this thing in the near future. Anyway, I think the low angle is also characteristic of small leagues. They probably can't afford anything fancier than just a single camera somewhere in the main stand. You know, just panning left and right. Ugh.

They said the dimensions were 110m by 70m during the game, and I believe those are the maximum dimensions for a football pitch. As someone else pointed out, it's probably the MLS-style low camera angle. It's a really boring angle, too.

I'm actually pretty impressed with what I'm seeing in Kakuta. He may not be contributing much offensively, but he's tracking back really nicely and making some runs trying to make something happen. I really appreciate that.

Yay, live on TSN. Finally making use of that ugly rectangular thingy.

Wouldn't this remark be insulting and somewhat racist because it's implying that Ashley "betrayed" his own race by sucking up to a white man per se? Anyway, I'm incredulous that Ferdinand, even though he's a completely jackass and all, would dare to say such a thing. On the other hand, good on Ashley for sorting it out like any sensible grownup would.

This is insane. I wonder how they can switch back and forth so easily.

Goddammit. Let's not do this, Florent.

He played very well yesterday despite that terrible mistake at the back. He showed exactly what you'd expect from a midfield play maker - get the ball, quickly advance, and play an incisive through ball forward. I'll have to see how well he does in the rest of our pre-season games, but my hopes are high.

He played better than I expected him to yesterday. For a young player, he looked very experienced, and he didn't look as "heavy" as I had thought him to be. It's probably not a bad idea to keep him around for the season OR to send him on loan. He'll probably get some minutes if he stuck around, but like Waterfall said, he should also do well if he went on loan. Maybe we should keep Benayoun for this season and send de Bruyne on loan.

A downside is that if he goes on loan, we'll only have two strikers left on the team, and neither of them has played well for us recently, and both are quite prone to injuries. That means we may have to sign a new forward, and I'm fine with that as long as we don't permanently land an expensive, top-class forward, but we'll definitely do that if we ever decide to get a new forward. At this stage, I think that would be a really wasteful thing to do because it will possibly demotivate Torres and stall the development of both Lukaku and Sturridge. But I still want Lukaku to go on loan because he really needs to improve on a lot of things before he can become a reliable option for us.

He's saying Lukaku's got a lot of room for development not that he won't be ready for another 5 years.

And that Romeu is more creative than him. If I'm not mistaken, he made one simple assist for us last season, and people were going insane about how he perfectly picked out Lampard, who was maybe 5 yards in front of him. The only three things Romeu is better at than Mikel currently is shooting, running and being aggressive, although the latter is not always a good thing since he's inexperienced. In almost every other aspect, Mikel is a much better player. He's more intelligent, more technical, stronger, and better at passing and defending.

That was unfortunate. Josh did well initially to intercept, though.

Brilliant goal! I already see some improvements in both McEachran and Lukaku.

Chalobah's starting? YES