Tomo

Although it was mainly done with Vardy in mind I'm glad Reece is playing in that hybrid position, will be bar far his best position within this system.

They actually didn't, there was still a chance for Dortmund at the business end last season small but still a chance and in the CL their semi and final opponents were in the same boat. It's no coincidence the 2019 final was an awful game quality wise after both had three weeks off.

If one good thing has come out of last night and our season likely going to the wire as a result it will mean we will have peak competitive sharpness heading to Porto whereas City are for all intents and purposes playing friendlies until then. It's an advantage we really need to make use of.

I honestly think if i was going (which I'm not) i would probably rather do the latter.

I would take the FA Cup and take my chances on the CL final, no risk, no reward. Maybe I'm being too idealistic but it's too Arsenal for my liking to settle for 4th (and it's a hard habit to break once you settle into it, even the biggest club in the country have fallen into the trap and are currently bragging about being home and dry), don't get me wrong I hope we get it but I just can't subscribe to treating it like I would a title race. The only time I did have the nerves like I do for a title bid for a top four race was 2003 and that was only because our future was likely at stake.

And this type of rewarding failure is exactly why the much maligned super league came about. I really hope they do rest their star players between now and the final, a City team lacking match practice suits us perfectly. Unfortunately however Pep won't be that stupid.

Off the top of my head Pirlo, Kante, Aubameyang, Suarez, Zlatan, Pogba, Modric, Ronaldinho (twice), David Silva, Tevez, Yaya, Kova, Di Maria, Vidal and Ribery were all attracted to clubs without CL football.

To put it another way, after Moscow did you take solace in our otherwise great record against United at the time?

It's awful but it does kind of sum it up that one of those wins came the one time they really really really needed it!

Say what you like about Werner infront of goal, it's no coincidence that our good/bad performances and results tend to directly correlate with whether he starts or not.

I'm talking about the 2003 (i think) final.

How often has that even happened? Only times i can think of that for cup finals is us and Liverpool (we won the final Liverpool won the league) and Arsenal vs Southampton (Arsenal won both).

Maybe I'm holding him to too high standards but I'm wondering if Silva should have gone to Smith Rowe and gambled on Kepa saving from Auba?

It's not really, with the run of the last few games all of our untouchables needed atleast one game without starting (I mentioned it a few days ago) and we've gone for half vs City and half tonight. The alternative is flog the best Xl to death and likely end up with a situation of the run in of 2015 were our players were running on empty.

You've got to rotate when you have such a heavy schedule and that's in a normal season let alone one like this. I remember Fergie came to The Bridge (Ballack double game) with the title far from secure and benched Ronaldo.

I'm massively anti Kepa but he did well to even get back to that.

I don't want any of our players going two weeks without a match before the final, even a week and a half is pushing it, we need match sharpness at an absolute high point before the final. In an ideal world we'll get top four done tomorrow (if we win then Liverpool lose it's done bar a major turn in GD by West Ham), rest for Leicester and play the best team at Villa.

Cases are pretty irrelevant at this stage, the most important metric is hospital admissions and death's and all the evidence is pointing to the vaccines protecting against it more than even the most optimistic scientist's would have dared believe possible.

How many times are "easy" games going to be used as a judgement in a top four race? The reason Liverpool are behind us at this point is because they have kept cocking up those type of games including the reverse fixtures of 2 of their final 3 so called easy games. West Ham supposedly had an easy run in where they were going to sweep up and they fell at the first hurdle. I'm not saying it won't happen, it could, but strength of fixtures in a top four race aren't anywhere near as relevant as they are in a title race.

He needs to at a minimum play the last two league games to be in contention. Can't make the same mistake Spurs did with Kane in 2019 and play a player barely match fit.

The summer of 2019 was a unique situation. We were losing the heartbeat of our attacking play and were not allowed to replace him. The title and CL (bar a fluke of all flukes in the latter case) was out of the question that summer which immediately put the emphasis on rebuilding the squad, we needed a manager who would put the club before his CV and preferably knew the academy players and their characteristics well and Lampard and Jody fitted the bill (case in point when Jody told Frank that Lamptey would be able to handle coming on at The Emirates). Yes as it turned out Lampard wasn't equipped tactically to enjoy the full fruits of his labour and yes looking back there's an argument for saying we maybe should have been ruthless last summer (although then we'd have likely been stuck with the overrated Pochettino over Tuchel) but the appointment at the time was the right decision.

But that already feeds in to what I was saying. There was always going to be an element of learning on the job but there's a difference between raw promise and the tactical cluster fuck we saw in those last two months. I think he did a very good job in season one and I would debate anyone on that but it was pretty clear he just didn't have it in for him for the next phase of the process, he was so wildly undercoaching our top talent.

The sacking of Frank happened because there's levels as to what's acceptable even during rebuilds.

He also didn't score against Arsenal in 21 games so it took until his 58th game involving Arsenal in some way to score.

For all this talk of us being a poisoned chalice I think the total opposite, I don't think there's many if any clubs better equipped to build an era of success than Chelsea, the fact we haven't found that manager yet shouldn't distract from that. They arrive to the best academy in the world (in terms of volume of quality produced) and an owner who heavily backs them, that's pretty much the dream scenario for a manager. Yes ofcourse big results are expected but why they shouldn't they be? You shouldn't need X amount of season's to become good with these type of resources. And that's before we get into the fact the narrative around us and managers make us a free hit in terms of career damage, there's no risk for potentially unlimited reward.