Blue Armour

All I can say is he is the difference maker. The performance of the team when he's on and when he's absent is like comparing night and day.

People talk about a team with 11 Azpi's, but what we really need to get going is a team of 2 Hazards. Honestly what I would give for just 1 player close to his attacking caliber in Jan, who can take part in combination plays... The thing is with Willian, Pedro and Fabregas moving out of their prime, they are no longer performing as well as they did last season. This is where we are coming up short at times, and the Everton game is a good example of that. Having Morata combine with Hazard makes up for it somewhat, but Alvaro is still young and inconsistent.

Hope he didn't wax his head or something. Miss the locks

Well if not Mahrez, I hope we get someone of similar caliber or better. If you saw Pep's reaction today to the Sanchez question, there are signs that they already have something lined up. Not that anything that City does matters much these days...

Well at least we're playing them at the Bridge

Sign him up. Can play in CL too.

That Juventus logo is such an eyesore.

It was indeed a flop show in the transfer market this term, but how is that down to Conte? (barring the Costa debacle of course, and I know you're no fan of Diego)

Well honestly, I think its about time he got rotated with Michy. Been lacking sharpness in the past few games. Would have rested Hazard too, but we are shite without him...so.,

Conte is forced to start him every game due to lack of options. Hazard starts playing each game at less than optimum efficiency. Today he had to struggle even more, because our brilliant defense allows us to go behind in the 6th minute itself. Forced to break down a ten man West ham wall for the entire match. Congratulations to all, but most of all a big thank you to the stupid FA and their **** broadcasting partners that decided to make this our second consecutive early kick-off following a European fixture on Wed. No conspiracy here, its just blatantly obvious whats going on.

Conte seems to be rotating the central midfield pretty capably so far. Everyone, apart from Kante that is. Interesting to see if he can come up for a solution for that one. Luiz + Bakayoko/Drinkwater, maybe?

Hazard

Indeed

Seriously though....B2B role in 3 man midfield is what suits him. Kante shielding the defence, Fabregas doing the chance creation, and Bakayoko for the mayhem. Would hesitate to say that its the same as Lampard-Essien-Makelele, but this works for me.

Yeah....so about trading Matic for Bakayoko,.

Just give him a red cape, and he looks like Superman on the pitch in this kind of form

Indeed. And its not the first time. You can just look at Danny Rose's comments at the start of the season, when he was commenting about our squad strength on display during the FA cup semi final last season

Kante and Drinkwater in midfield I guess..worth a shot. At this point anything is better than the Fabregas Bakayoko 2-man combo

I'm guessing its because its a world cup year coming up...

Looks like everyone is on edge after the past few weeks. But I agree we did play well in this one. This is just one of the matches where you can just take a look at the final stats to see how superior we were in this match. And no surprises as to why, considering who was the most dominant player in the attacking third. Most number of chances created by him in a single match in the past 2 seasons I think

A little bit of canvas art I created for our Belgian wizard

Thought Drinkwater is at least another 3 weeks away (despite being sighted in first team training)? Doubt he'll be part of this game

And on top of that, the fact he can speak English, French and Spanish and it looks like like he has all the tools to succeed in a captain's role

He has had poor games before in seasons past. But this is the first time I'm seeing him perform this way, 3 games in a row. Also he doesn't seem to be getting forward as much. Definitely not as much as he did in the first few games of the season. It could have been due to the high press employed by teams we played recently, but I'm more inclined to think that its due to fatigue.