Vesper

2 nil what a goal by Kovacic

lol already 1 nil Citeh

brutal Spuds run out (other than the 2 shit teams that we fucked up against)

NUFC 2nd lowest EPL possession ever that resulted in a 4 plus goal win truly shows what a shit stat possession is

the rest of the day's EPL steams: Nоttіnghаm Fоrеst – Wоlvеrhаmрtоn England. Premier League / 13 April at 15:00 Mаnсhеstеr Сіty – Lutоn Tоwn England. Premier League / 13 April at 15:00 Burnlеy – Brіghtоn England. Premier League / 13 April at 15:00 Brеntfоrd – Shеffіеld Utd England. Premier League / 13 April at 15:00 Bоurnеmоuth – Mаnсhеstеr Utd England. Premier League / 13 April at 17:30

so embarrasing how much better the Geordies' buys have been lately versus ours shameful!

Spuds have a 15 day break to sit and stew in their fail

lol, that cunt Romero trying to start a fight after the whistle blow

4 nil FT Spuds with probably their worst league game of the season

I was open to him coming here when so many were taking a steaming hot shit on him he has pace to burn and FAR more nous than Muddy plus he is HG

they said that 70 to 80 per cent of Spuds fans have already left WEAK!!!!

Spuds have been shit from the kickoff 😍

4 nil NUFC Fabian Schär

Werner still Mr Offside and still Timo Feet of Stone, Touch of Lead

3 nil Isak on a hat trick

Isak 20 goals in 2400 minutes, 16 of them EPL goals, he has scored in 11 out of his last 12 home games Gordon 11 goals 8 assists (10 and 7 in the EPL)

2 nil Gordon

1 nil NUFC Isak

sorry, we just got back in Nеwсаstlе Unіtеd vs Tоttеnhаm 13 April 2024 at 12:30. Browser Links 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 99% Web 972kbps 95% Aliez 975kbps 54% Aliez 970kbps 47% Aliez 2500kbps 47% Aliez 47% Web 46% Web 46% Web 46% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web 965kbps 57% Aliez 970kbps 51% Aliez 882kbps 45% Aliez 956kbps 45% Aliez 2000kbps 68% Aliez 1861kbps 59% Aliez 1861kbps 57% Aliez 1859kbps 54% Aliez 1904kbps 48% Aliez 2500kbps 45% Aliez 46% Web 46% Web 45% Web 45% Web 45% Web AceStream Links 8000kbps 45% 45% 45% 45%

I have said for some time that I wager PSG make seriously robust moves for both Osimhen and Rafael Leão with the huge savings they get back with Mbappe going to Real Rafael Leão and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia are the only 2 sub 31yo (as Salah is soon 32) actually world class wingers remoptely avalable (of any side of play or type of footedness) Leroy Sané is perhaps next, but he turns 29 in midseason and doesnt want to really leave Lautaro Martínez is the only other truly world class even remotely available CF beside Osimhen, but I doubt he would leave Inter for PSG Dušan Vlahović would be next, but he is a pretty big drop down from those two

Chelsea have spent £1bn – but how much of that have they seen on the pitch? https://theathletic.com/5404135/2024/04/11/Chelsea-billion-boehly-clearlake-players/ The money colours everything. Whenever and wherever Chelsea fail on the pitch these days, a reference (usually gleeful or taunting in nature) to the £1billion ($1.27bn) that owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital committed to transfer fees for player signings in their first three transfer windows after acquiring the club in June 2022 is never far behind. That gargantuan number sets the parameters for both the expectations and the schadenfreude, most memorably encapsulated by Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville branding Chelsea “blue billion-pound bottle jobs” in the closing minutes of their Carabao Cup final defeat against Liverpool. For many people, no further analysis of the £1billion is necessary. It offers an incomplete picture of Chelsea’s overall transfer dealings (more than £300million has also been recouped through player sales in the same period) but, as numeric shorthand, it is accurate enough. The Athletic estimates that Boehly and Clearlake committed £977.5million to transfer and loan fees in their first three windows, with add-ons likely to take the eventual spend into 10 figures. There is no debate that the short-term returns on that vast investment have been shockingly bad, with Chelsea forced to confront the very real prospect of a second consecutive Premier League season spent almost entirely in mid-table, followed by a second consecutive campaign without European football of any kind at Stamford Bridge in 2024-25. But beyond the team’s deeply inconsistent performances and often underwhelming results there is a question that yields some equally startling answers: how much of the £1billion Boehly-Clearlake transfer spend have Chelsea even seen on the pitch in the last two years? With the notable exception of Kendry Paez — who will complete his £17.3million move to Stamford Bridge from Independiente Del Valle when he turns 18 in May 2025 — The Athletic has looked at all of Boehly-Clearlake’s 29 other signings to examine what percentage of the available Chelsea first-team minutes each has played since they joined the club. Based on the results, the players were then divided into four brackets: those who have played fewer than 25 per cent of the available Chelsea minutes since signing; those who have played between 25 and 50 per cent; those who have played between 50 and 75 per cent; and those who have played 75 per cent or more of the available first-team minutes as Chelsea players. The breakdown of these brackets — and the cumulative transfer fees commanded by the players within them — is illustrated by the pie chart below. As you can see, a whopping £303.9million (or 31 per cent of the total Boehly-Clearlake transfer spend in the first three windows of their ownership) has barely been seen on the pitch for Chelsea at all: This lowest bracket includes developmental signings like Gabriel Slonina, Cesare Casadei, David Datro Fofana, Andrey Santos, Angelo Gabriel and Deivid Washington, several of whom have spent all or the majority of their young Chelsea careers out on loan. Boehly and Clearlake priced in their lack of short-term contribution in the belief that they can one day blossom into stars, or at least grow into assets who can be sold for profit. It also includes Wesley Fofana (20.3%), Christopher Nkunku (11.4%) and Romeo Lavia (0.9%), £176million in purchases who were expected to play big first-team roles but have instead been derailed by injuries. Fofana has not featured at all this season, Lavia will finish the campaign with 33 minutes to his name and Nkunku has played almost 300 fewer minutes in 2023-24 than Armando Broja, who joined Fulham on loan at the start of February. The two middle brackets indicate signings who have at least been supporting contributors in Chelsea’s squad. At the lower end are Marc Cucurella (38.6%), Benoit Badiashile (32.9%), Mykhailo Mudryk (39.3%) and Noni Madueke (27.3%). At the higher end, you find Raheem Sterling (62.6%), Nicolas Jackson (72.3%) and Malo Gusto (58.6% this season, after spending 2022-23 back on loan at Lyon) as well as goalkeepers Robert Sanchez (50.2%) and Djordje Petrovic (56.2%), who have both been given sustained runs in the No 1 spot this season. Only four players have been on the pitch for more than 75 per cent of Chelsea’s available first-team minutes since arriving: Enzo Fernandez (83.9%), Moises Caicedo (85.8%), Axel Disasi (95.4%) and Cole Palmer (86.3%), who have all been pillars of head coach Mauricio Pochettino’s team selection. This is not a direct indicator of a successful signing. Fernandez and Caicedo in particular appear to have struggled with such a high load. But it does underline that they are regarded as key cogs in the team being constructed at Stamford Bridge. Fernandez and Caicedo’s status as two of the four most expensive Premier League signings ever has been a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it has saddled them with arguably impossible expectations at a time when both are still developing their skills. On the other, it virtually guarantees them opportunities to play through their mistakes and stretches of bad form, since Chelsea have so much invested in their success. Below them, the other expensive acquisitions of the Boehly-Clearlake era have had wildly diverging fortunes. Mudryk and Cucurella are not as prominent in this Chelsea team as their price tags suggest they should be while Sterling, the marquee signing of the summer of 2022, has not played enough minutes to be viewed as integral despite missing no significant time through injury over the past two seasons: The fact that Fernandez and Palmer, two of the most important players to the Boehly-Clearlake project, were deadline-day signings only provides further ammunition to those who believe their unprecedented recruitment drive was haphazard and lacking in coherent strategy. Chelsea were also only in position to announce the arrival of Caicedo on August 14, a day after the opening game of the 2023-24 season, despite pursuing him as their top midfield target for much of the summer and ultimately going well above their own valuation in order to get their man. But the bigger picture offers tentative signs of improvement. The summer window of 2023 was the first to be formally led by co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, and the players who arrived at Stamford Bridge in that period have been significantly more prominent than those signed when Boehly first assumed the role on an interim basis: Breaking down the Boehly-Clearlake transfer spend clarifies details and entrenches viewpoints. Those who believe Chelsea’s owners have contrived to spend £1billion wildly badly will point to almost a third of that figure barely being seen on the pitch for the first team, and fewer than a handful of the signings establishing themselves as stalwarts under Pochettino. Others will look at the same figures and argue it shows a heavily future-focused transfer strategy, undermined in the short term by bad injury luck, but retaining huge long-term upside. It may be years before the argument is definitively settled, and Chelsea’s fortunes on the pitch in the coming seasons will be decisive. But from now until then, expect the word “billion” to remain the central word in the discourse around this Boehly-Clearlake investment project, because the money colours everything.

Premier League agree new financial fair play rules for next season https://theathletic.com/5407740/2024/04/11/premier-league-ffp-rules-new/ Premier League clubs have unanimously agreed in principle to introduce new financial fair play regulations at a meeting in London on Thursday. The profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) that have capped how much money clubs can spend over the last decade are set to be scrapped from the start of the 2025-26 season and replaced with a similar “squad cost control” rule to the one UEFA adopted in 2022. The new system, which must still be fully ratified at the Premier League’s annual general meeting (AGM) in June, will work as a shadow to the existing PSR regime next season. There were actually two votes at Thursday’s shareholders’ meeting. The first, which received unanimous backing, was to progress discussions on the finer details of the Premier League squad cost rules, with a view to adding the new regime to the rulebook this summer. The second, which was supported by a strong majority, was on how the new regulations would be phased in. Under the proposed new regime, clubs will only be allowed to spend a set percentage of their annual turnover on the wage bill for the first team and its coaching staff, plus the amortised costs of their transfer fees and all agents’ fees. Amortisation is how transfers are accounted for in club’s financial reports, with the cost of acquiring players, including fee and salary, spread out over the length of their contracts. The major difference between the Premier League and UEFA regulations will be that the Premier League will operate a two-tier system, with clubs playing in European competition only able to spend 70 per cent of their turnover, while clubs not competing in Europe able to spend 85 per cent. Contrary to recent reports, clubs that breach the Premier League’s rules will still be subject to points deductions. The current PSR guidelines — which see clubs allowed to lose a maximum of £105million over a rolling three-year accounting cycle — have seen Everton twice hit with points deductions this season with Nottingham Forest also penalised. However, some clubs are still keen to explore the possibility of introducing financial penalties, instead of points deductions, for minor breaches of the squad cost rule. Some clubs have suggested this could work like a US-style luxury tax, while others have preferred to talk about a “buffer zone” for less serious cases that do not merit points deductions. This, among several other discussions about the finer details of the new rules, will all be resolved at the league’s two-day AGM in Harrogate, with a final vote on the matter set for June 5. There has still been no discussion about increasing the current PSR threshold from £105m with some clubs believing the figure, which was set a decade ago, should be raised to reflect rising wages and transfer fees. What is UEFA’s ‘squad cost control’ rule? UEFA approved the squad cost ratio rule at an executive committee meeting in April 2022 as part of its new financial sustainability and club licensing regulations, which also cover ‘solvency’ and ‘stability’. It replaced UEFA’s previous Financial Fair Play (FFP) system, which allowed clubs to make losses of up to €30m over a three-year accounting period. The squad cost rule limits a club’s spending on player and coach wages, transfers and agent fees to 70 per cent of their revenue. UEFA is phasing its rules in over three seasons, with clubs that play in its competitions allowed to spend 90 per cent of their turnover on their squads this season, 80 per cent next season and 70 per cent in 2025-26, which is when the new Premier League rules should come into full effect, too. What are UEFA’s punishments for financial breaches? The UEFA regulations state that breaching the squad cost ratio will see clubs hit with a financial penalty — unless it is a “significant” breach. The extent of the financial sanction is decided based on the extent of the breach and the number of breaches over the past three seasons of the new rules. A “significant” breach, UEFA says, comes in three forms: A club’s ratio is 20 per cent over the threshold A club’s ratio is 10 per cent over the threshold and it has breached the limit in one of the past three seasons A club’s ratio is any amount over the threshold and it has breached the limit in two of the past three seasons In this case, UEFA says “additional disciplinary measures” can be applied alongside the financial penalty. Under the previous FFP rules, UEFA could and did sanction clubs in a variety of ways depending on the severity of the offence. What has the Premier League previously said about its financial rules? Following a shareholders’ meeting on March 11, the Premier League issued a statement saying its clubs had “agreed to prioritise the swift development and implementation of a new league-wide financial system”, without disclosing any further details. It added that this new system would “provide certainty for clubs in relation to their future financial plans”. The Premier League also said the clubs had “re-confirmed their commitment to securing a sustainably-funded financial agreement with the EFL“, although that itself remains subject to that new financial system.

The Chelsea ‘project’ is a mess, confused and drifting. This is not how to build a club https://theathletic.com/5400398/2024/04/09/Chelsea-pochettino-boehly-clearlake-project/ The scoreboard said almost three minutes of stoppage time had been played when Sheffield United’s Oli McBurnie smashed the ball into Chelsea’s net on Sunday evening. But that wasn’t strictly true. Since the game at Bramall Lane ticked into overtime, the ball had been in play for precisely 28 seconds. Until McBurnie scored, stoppage time had been a non-event. The first passage of play consisted of Axel Disasi sending an aimless free kick into opposition territory, where an abject game of head tennis ensued — Sheffield United winning five headers, Chelsea one — before Enzo Fernandez fouled Gustavo Hamer. Another minute passed without the ball in play. Chelsea coach Mauricio Pochettino made a double substitution, replacing Marc Cucurella and Nicolas Jackson with Benoit Badiashile and Cesare Casadei. It was textbook stuff: eat up some more time and get some more height on the pitch, given that an aerial onslaught was the opposition’s only real hope of forcing an equaliser. Do you want to understand the biggest story of the day before anyone else? Sign up here for our brilliant new daily newsletter Ivo Grbic went short with the free kick and then Jayden Bogle went long. Badiashile challenged McBurnie for the ball, the pair of them at full stretch, but they both missed it. Vinicius Souza retrieved it from the byline, given a little too much time by Casadei. By the time Moises Caicedo and Carney Chukwuemeka had woken up to the sight of James McAtee in space, Oliver Arblaster was free behind him. Arblaster clipped the ball into the danger area, but Fernandez got his head to the cross and, with that, Chelsea’s players seemed to relax. There was another header to be won on the edge of the penalty area. Mykhailo Mudryk, another Chelsea substitute, seemed to be the favourite to win it against Hamer, the smallest player on the pitch — but while Hamer leapt with all the power he could muster, Mudryk barely got off the ground. Hamer won the challenge and suddenly the ball was travelling back into the Chelsea penalty area. There were seven Chelsea outfield players between the penalty spot and the 18-yard line. If you were looking at it from above, you would say they were well-positioned — but they were also, almost without exception, flat-footed, ball-watching or both. Sheffield United’s Cameron Archer won the second ball; Trevoh Chalobah got closest to him but, like Mudryk, didn’t really get off the ground. McBurnie was already anticipating the flick-on. Badiashile, crucially, was not. It was a terrible goal to concede at any time, never mind in stoppage time. The defending wasn’t quite as egregious as Manchester United’s when Chelsea scored a 111th-minute winner at Stamford Bridge on Thursday night, but it carried the same traits: lack of composure, lack of endeavour, lack of responsibility, lack of awareness, lack of fight. Eight days earlier, Chelsea had contrived to surrender a winning position at home to struggling Burnley, who played the majority of the game with 10 men. After that match, Pochettino pointed to his heart and his head and said his team’s problems lay “here” and “here” — “the capacity, the energy, the hunger that is the minimum to compete in the Premier League”. It was a sweeping, rudimentary diagnosis, the type that is very easy for a coach to offer when wishing to create lines of separation between himself and his team’s failings. But… he’s right, isn’t he? This is a group of players who, with Cole Palmer a very notable exception, have looked happy to go through the motions in the Premier League, performing when the conditions are favourable and the wind is in their sails but showing a distinct lack of fight on so many occasions when they have been required to dig deeper. It is a coach’s job to instil those qualities in a team. For all the obvious technical and tactical advances made by Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal under Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta, those teams are underpinned by desire and a collective sense of purpose. But those teams were also built with a clear vision in mind, rather than the type of reckless, unbridled, scattergun spending sprees that characterised Chelsea’s first three transfer windows under a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital. GO DEEPER Have Chelsea improved in the year since they sacked Graham Potter? Even now, it is worth remembering that Chelsea’s transfer outlay in their first year under these owners was the biggest in the history of the game: £70million ($89m) on Wesley Fofana, £33m on Kalidou Koulibaly, £47.5m on Raheem Sterling, £63m on Cucurella, an initial £62m (potentially rising to £88.5m) for Mudryk, £33m on Badiashile, £29m on Noni Madueke and £106m on Fernandez, to cite just eight of the players they signed. They followed that last summer by spending £115m on Moises Caicedo, £53m on Romeo Lavia, £52m on Christopher Nkunku, £25m on Robert Sanchez, £38.8m on Disasi, £23m on Lesley Ugochukwu, £32m on Nicolas Jackson and — in the final hours before the transfer deadline — a seriously overdue coup with the inspired acquisition of Palmer from Manchester City for £40m. It all looked wild at the time. It looks even worse now with Chelsea sitting ninth in the Premier League — far closer, in points terms, to the relegation zone than the top three. Since the start of last season, they have won as many points as Brentford and three fewer than Fulham. They are top of one table, however. On Friday afternoon, when the Football Association published its breakdown of intermediary payments by clubs over the past two transfer windows, Chelsea were shown to have paid an extraordinary total of £75,140,524 — almost £15million more than the next club, Manchester City, and more than double the sum paid by any other English club. That reflects a huge number of outgoing transfers as well as incoming deals and new contracts for Thiago Silva and Fernandez, among others. But again the sums involved are enormous. The gains? Less so. There are obvious attractions to a recruitment strategy that is based around young talent, but almost everything Chelsea have done has looked flawed. They had already signed four central midfielders between the ages of 19 and 22 (Fernandez, Ugochukwu, Casadei, Andrey Santos) before they broke the British transfer record to sign a fifth (Caicedo) in August and then, seemingly in a fit of pique, added a sixth (Lavia). Talented players, all of them, but what is the vision here? What is the pathway for Lavia, Ugochukwu, Casadei and Santos? How many of these players are going to make the grade at Chelsea? GO DEEPER Chelsea top Premier League for spend on agent fees And if the whole thing is based around resale value, then a serious question: how many of Chelsea’s signings have performed in a way that would enable the club, hypothetically, to sell them at a profit? Palmer certainly, Jackson probably, Gusto possibly, but many others would not. Even some of those players that looked like clever, low-risk, (relatively) low-cost investments now appear to be diminishing rather than flourishing assets. All of this would be more easily glossed over if Chelsea were performing well on the pitch, but it has felt as if every step back forward has been swiftly followed by another step back. The injuries suffered by Reece James, Fofana, Nkunku and others offer a degree of mitigation, but it falls a long way short of excusing underperformance on this scale. It is worth acknowledging they are scoring more goals and winning more games than last season. In terms of attacking play, their expected goals (xG) numbers are better (up from 1.34 per game to a much healthier 2.08 per game). Subjectively, it seems fair to say their best performances this term (the 4-4 and 1-1 draws with Manchester City, the 3-1 win at Aston Villa in the FA Cup) have been more energetic, more fluent and more incisive than anything they produced in the second half of last season under Graham Potter or Frank Lampard. But even Pochettino is not pretending it is good enough; having spent much of the campaign in trust-the-process mode, he has now begun to hint publicly at flaws in the dysfunctional project he has taken on. GO DEEPER The Premier League has descended into playground football - and it's great “It’s about being able to compete,” Pochettino said in his post-match press conference on Sunday. “For different reasons, we struggle to compete in these types of games. Maybe I repeat too much, but watching football like us, at 52 years old, you identify really quickly if the team is ready to compete or not. Maybe this group still is not mature enough to compete in every single game every three days.” The problem is that Chelsea’s lack of maturity is evident in almost every game. Their seven-match unbeaten run in the Premier League is their best since late 2021, but the draws with Burnley and Sheffield United were defined by frailties, as was the victory over Manchester United for long periods. Likewise the wins against Leeds United and Leicester City in the FA Cup. In arguably the best period of their season, with an FA Cup semi-final on the horizon and a top-six finish not out of the question, Pochettino sounds less convinced by the group of players he is working with. It has been intriguing to hear him express concerns about players living in a “comfort zone”. Lampard spoke in similar terms during his brief spell as interim coach at the end of last season. It is almost as if signing more young, unproven players than a manager knows what to do with — giving some of them seven-year or eight-year contracts — is a recipe for confusion and complacency rather than a stroke of genius. The whole thing looks so confused. Why did they sign Badiashile in January last year when they already had a highly promising left-sided central defender, Levi Colwill, earning rave reviews on loan at Brighton & Hove Albion? Why did they sign Ugochukwu last summer when they already had Fernandez, Casadei and Santos and were about to sign Caicedo and Lavia (to say nothing of Conor Gallagher, whom they were determined to sell but who ended up staying and starting almost every game)? Why loan out Lewis Hall and Ian Maatsen when left-back remains a problem? To what extent were the deals for Mudryk and Lavia in particular driven by FOMO? How many “project” players does it take before a wider “project” is undermined? Quite apart from the defending for Sheffield United’s equaliser on Sunday, there was something insipid about the way Chelsea attacked at 2-1 up. Time and again there were poor decisions or poor execution: Jackson setting off too early and running into an offside position on 77 minutes (and Fernandez overhitting the pass in any case); Jackson running straight into a defender when he and Chukwuemeka had the chance of an overload on 79 minutes; Chukwuemeka misplacing a basic pass to Madueke on the right-hand side on 81 minutes. The only pass Mudryk completed, as an 82nd-minute substitute, was from the kick-off after McBurnie’s goal. It is a young team: Badiashile is 23, Malo Gusto 20, Fernandez 23, Caicedo 22, Chukwuemeka 20, Madueke 22, Mudryk 23, Jackson 22 and so on. So many of these players have the capacity to improve — but how many of them look substantially better prospects for the time they have spent at Chelsea? Gusto, arguably. Jackson perhaps, given he has scored nine Premier League goals. The qualities of Fernandez and Caicedo are obvious, but it is hard to go overboard about their impact when a sense of control in midfield is so often elusive. There has been talk of both Arsenal and Liverpool having “dodged a bullet” when Chelsea blew them out of the water in the pursuit of Mudryk and Caicedo respectively. But that is nonsense. It is easy to imagine a scenario in which Mudryk would have made the same kind of impact at Arsenal as Leandro Trossard has. Likewise, it is easy to imagine Caicedo would have thrived in Liverpool’s midfield, resuming his Brighton partnership with Alexis Mac Allister. At the same time, it is notable how many recent players who have left Chelsea over the past few years are thriving elsewhere: Jorginho and Kai Havertz at Arsenal, Marc Guehi at Crystal Palace, Antonio Rudiger at Real Madrid, Fikayo Tomori, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Christian Pulisic at AC Milan. Mateo Kovacic hasn’t quite had the same impact at Manchester City and Mason Mount has experienced a wretched time with injuries at Manchester United, but the overall picture invites further questions about Chelsea’s strategy both before and particularly since the Boehly-Clearlake takeover. Even Pochettino’s fiercest critic might concede that, for all the talent and potential in this squad, there is also a distinct shortage of players with the right combination of hunger and know-how. Yes, Fernandez was a World Cup winner at 21, but that was an experienced Argentina team full of battle-hardened competitors. At Chelsea, he and Caicedo are expected to be leaders at an age when they are still trying to find their way in an unfamiliar, unsettled environment. It is legitimate to wonder whether Pochettino has what it takes to unlock the potential in this squad but the more you look at Chelsea, the more it becomes apparent this malaise goes far deeper than the manager and far, far deeper than his tactics or team selection on any given matchday. It is only a few weeks since he was barracked with chants of, “You don’t know what you’re doing” for replacing Mudryk with Chukwuemeka at 2-2 against Leicester in the FA Cup. Quite apart from the vindication that followed when Chukwuemeka scored, the cold, hard reality is that Mudryk, like others, has done nothing like enough at Chelsea to become a cause celebre or a stick with which to beat another unloved coach. It sometimes looks like one of those squads where there are no right answers, only wrong ones. There is always an assumption that young players and young teams will get better: another year older, another year wiser. But football rarely works like that. If individual and collective development was linear, the past two seasons would have gone an awful lot more smoothly for Chelsea. And while there is always the temptation to blame the coach for all of a team’s ills, surely the miserable 12 months that have passed since Potter’s dismissal, seven months into a five-year contract, should dissuade people from the assumption that another change of manager is all that is needed here. The whole thing is a mess but it requires patience. Not because there is any certainty that patience will pay off, but because, having spent such a huge amount of money in such an extreme manner, Chelsea’s decision-makers have left themselves with little choice — either financially or strategically — but to hope that these players come good. The past few weeks alone have given a few Palmer-inspired glimpses of how things could be, along with a few brutal reminders of how things are. Nearly two years into the Boehly-Clearlake era, the wild, overexcited zeal that launched that regime seems to have given way to an uncomfortable state of drift and a desperate hope that lessons are learned, pennies start to drop and that somehow, from out of the chaos of the past couple of years, a serious football team emerges. GO DEEPER Chelsea may have spent £1bn - but how much of that have they seen on the pitch?