Styles

Even though there are a plethora of reasons why this would fail...fuck it. Sometimes things are not supposed to make sense. A year long farewell tour for Didi. I'm down. Oh, and Torres will be even further down the pecking order. Come home, Didi.

Too many cooks. I'd fancy a well drilled and balanced side to beat that kind of team more often than not.

I was under the assumption Luis would turn 29 on his, er, 29th birthday.

He does that a lot and it's very high risk/high reward. When he does win the ball he immediately puts us in position to counter, but when the opponents bypass him there is acres of space in-front of the two CBs. And Terry/Cahill prefer to defend deep so they don't move forward into the space Matic vacates. Matic's style requires a lot of stamina and I've noticed he tends to tire quite a bit. Even when he wasn't playing midweek Champions League games he looked gassed after 60 minutes which was worrying. I really don't see how a Matic-Fabregas pivot (which is what a lot of people want) is going to work against competent opponents, let alone the top sides. The Tiago rumour makes a lot of sense the more I think about our midfield.

Trying to force passes that aren't really on and turning the ball over, it happened several times in the first half yesterday. Obviously that's the risk that comes with playing progressive passes so we can't complain too much, it's just sometimes there are some passes that are CLEARLY not on and he'll still try to make the pass which is something he needs to cut out.

Matic was sloppy. He had a few games like that towards the end of last season, Palace away when he was really bad sticks out. It's great that he wants to play forward passes but he needs to be more careful with the ball.

Good, it's time to put up or shut up. And Torres goes further down the pecking order: everybody's happy.

Yeah right!

We're also one injury away from Torres getting a lot of minutes again. We've had a good summer...so far. We still need another striker.

LOL I saw this comment on the match thread on the WAGNH site

Pissed off man! I could only watch the first 30 minutes tonight and it sounds like I missed a really good Boga performance.

Hope to see Boga play for a bit. He was really unlucky with injuries last year.

Azpi and Luis are going to SHUT DOWN the flanks next season.

A left-footed LB! I forgot what those were.

He's wearing jeans, leave him alone

Torres scored a lot of goals in the Europa League that year. Obviously Costa's general performances need to be of a high standard but I want the numbers too. I'm hoping Costa can deliver 20+ goals and consistently good performances, and that is something Torres has never and will never give us.

Welcome. 20+ goals, please. Thanks. Styles

No, it doesn't. I'm saying Lukaku got dropped for a relatively unknown 19 year old (who has scored 7 goals in his entire club career) because he couldn't control the ball. Doesn't exactly bode well for a future at an elite European club does it?

I believe Lukaku is as good as he'll ever be now. His technique won't improve beyond what it is in my opinion. He just got dropped for a 19 year old in the World Cup because he couldn't control the ball consistently. I can safely say Lukaku is not good enough now and will never be for what we require.

Interesting... Are Lukaku's two seasons on loan better than Ba's two seasons with Newcastle? The numbers are quite similar, and one player is being described as not good enough while the other is supposed to be our future.

I still remember Lukaku's performance against Bayern when he came on in the Super Cup final. People spoke at length about the penalty miss and said he wasn't ready because of that, but his general performance was woeful. He was walking around when we needed him to work hard. Ba has been very unlucky here and remains largely underrated. Good luck to him and I hope he has a great time in Turkey.

Might sound controversial but Ba is better than Lukaku in my honest opinion. I know who I would trust if we played an important game any time soon.

We don't need him, we have Victor Moses back from loan

Have to wait that little bit longer now!