Mhsc

Imagine a ball playing GK just went high up the priority list.

Also this really makes me wonder about the Poch appointment. Now we ONLY want positional play managers but a year ago we went for Mr Run Around A Lot Lads. What the fuck. What kind of long term strategy / plan is there supposed to be here?

I have mixed feelings, I think De Zerbi would have been more exciting to watch honestly but I could totally see Enzo working out. I assume they've picked him because they think he will play a 4-3-3 with Caicedo, Lavia and Enzo in the middle (the chosen three the directors spent £££ on as the heartbeat of the team). It honestly might work. I don't know a lot about the man though. If he can handle in game well and make adjustments to beat the opposition (as De Zerbi has been great at as shown by 2nd half results under him) then he may well work out. You'd hope that whatever he's pulled off at Leicester the boys here will pull off at least twice as well.

Also we can't have two Enzos ffs

Club seem obsessed with idea of finding gems where others do not, both in terms of players and managers. But its not like this guy is available for cheap - £10m to get him is what it would cost us to get pretty much anyone. I don't get it. But I guess Joe Shields knows this guy personally, and he's the only senior figure in the club I do not feel let down by yet. So if this is him pushing for his guy, I'm down. Either way whoever we hire deserves his fair shot and our backing until they prove they're not worth it, just because the owners / directors keep doing strange things we should not turn on the manager until he deserves it. Keep the hate where it is due imo.

What TF is taking so long with appointing someone. Must be PR games to get us desperate enough that we'll be happy just having any manager at all. Isn't this crucial time to work with the Directors on the squad?

Lets not forget that the progress he made was just the sort of form that we would have probably had all season if he had not almost maliciously abused the squad, playing players in ridiculous positions and doing 0 tactical/strategic training and just asking the lads to play with passion, as well as flogging the shit out of them in training and simultaneously failing to get anybody into any kind of fitness until the end of the season. He was an improvement on Lampard but a downgrade on Potter. What he was good at was being nice to the players, that is clear - they loved him. He was good at hosting BBQs. He was mostly not bad in front of the press, but he failed to establish any relationship with the fans. How low are our standards if we're saying Poch was making real progress, it is sad what we have become.

I want a manager like De Zerbi because we've got a crop of young players who don't know how to play together, most of whom are not very intelligent or experienced footballers. This is the result of the recruitment and it is what it is. It is much cheaper and realistic to get a manager like De Zerbi or Sarri to train them in a system they can follow than rebuild the whole squad. I think it will get us back to top 4 which is all we can hope for in the next few years.

Spent all of last summer pining for Eze and Olise and everyone was saying we need Rayan fucking Cherki instead

https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/article/conference-league-qualification-for-next-season-confirmed God the club sounds excited ffs

They just won an important trophy against Man City. I'd say they deserve it. In the end despite all the laughter they have had a much better season than us.

Lets be real. We don't deserve Europe. We were basically fluking our way in after an insanely lucky end of season and total collapse of others, and that as it happened there was some chance 6th could get a Europa spot. Also very bad for the long term development of our players, not getting to experience European football for another year. When we finally get in, they will be shell shocked.

It was a mismatch of squad building & manager choice. Maybe originally when they appointed Poch they thought they were building a squad that would suit him, with Ugarte "locked in" and they ended up building something really not suited to him at all. Of course if Poch was an elite coach he would have adapted, and found a way to get through the season without the shambles that we saw happening. Manager choice so far is the owner & directors biggest failing. A bunch of uninspired hires that..turned out to be uninspiring.

Poch left us in this mess, hoping for City to win and missing out on Europe like this.

City still hungover plus they just don't really give a shit, was worried this would happen. Means so much more to Utd than them.

I reckon it is Amorim, more so than the De Zerbi conspiracy theory on Twitter (although I think De Zerbi would be good for us too) Supposedly he was in London talking to West Ham but now they've appointed someone else. Surely he was actually here talking to us. We all agreed to deny the fuck out of it afterwards out of respect for everyone involved (Poch, Sporting). Now we're waiting for Sporting to play the cup final, he'll say his goodbyes and we'll announce.

Bit of a narrative on twitter that wouldn't surprise me at all saying Poch out / RDZ in was decided a while ago and they're teasing some shit names through media puppets til June to make all Chelsea fans happy when it turns out it is RDZ and not Mourinho or some random guy from the Championship. Would not surprise me at all tbh. Timing of RDZ out / Poch out news and the history of us going after people from Brighton...

I don't know who I'd want less between Frank round 3 and Mourinho round 3. Maybe we should throw in Avram Grant round 2 or Rafa Benitez round 2 just to get some really gross options in there boys The only plus side to Mourinho is that it would be pretty hilarious watching him speak the truth about these owners to get himself sacked for a huge pay out

What kind of football does Mourinho even play now? I assume its the same old shit that stopped being relevant 10 years ago?

He / his agent clearly decided to kill all media noise until after Sporting's season is finished, which imo is the proper and respectful thing to do. But seems like he's going somewhere. I don't know much about him except he apparently always plays 3 ATB... Don't really think that suits our squad these days. We have lots of average CBs, doesn't make a lot of sense to me to play a system that gets 3 of them on the field.

I don't know anything about McKenna, I'm not gonna lie. That is in a nutshell why it is kind of mad. I was in favour of De Zerbi because I honestly feel like he's built the reputation in the PL to walk into our dressing room and be respected and heard from day 1 - mostly because our dressing room is mostly filled with kids and it shouldn't take TOO much to get them to respect you. But how is anyone goign to take McKenna seriously, unless he's got some amazing force of personality? Maybe he does? (like I said, literally don't know anything about the man). Feels very much like Potter round 2, but with less "big names" to get grumpy about him being there and the insanely bloated squad problem resolved.

One cynical view might be that really all they want to achieve is to establish a series of "talent factories" that produce world class academy talent, selling them for huge profits, and buying young players to sell on for big profits in the future. Then the only priority with the manager is someone that wont argue and is good enough to take a talented bunch of kids into the top 4 regularly, and can grow the kids and play the sort of football that increases their value. Could argue Poch has done that for Gallagher - he was basically Poch's perfect player, and now they'll sell him while his value is peaking. Then the new manager maybe will make some of our wingers look insane for the next year and they'll sell those off, and chop and change the manager again for whoever they think will boost the right players transfer values... Cynical and probably mostly wrong, but it has crossed my mind... Essentially the Tony Bloom approach but with way more cash and bigger risk / bigger reward if it goes well.

De Zerbi to me feels like the safest option available. Obviously, we'd have to sell Sanchez immediately if he comes, but hey ho. He ticks so many boxes of what the owners want. The question of course is why the fuck did he and Bloom fall out so bad that they've parted ways even though most of the players are loyal to De Zerbi to the point they might walk en masse now? De Zerbi seems like the type that will speak out, and also challenge for more say in transfers. So on that front it might be Poch 2.0 but isn't every manager who is a "winner" that is passionate first and foremost about winning trophies going to complain about a strategy that involves not winning much of anything for years?