CHOULO19

Just a thought. Rooney is leaving utd because he is no longer first choice. But would he be first choice here? I mean is Rooney as lone striker better than Lukaku? For me he is best played as a second striker. Not sure he'd work that well alone up front.

So, Mata who somehow managed to stay on form all of last season, had the longest orgasm in history?

I just hope that Torres isn't our shooting guard!

Haha fine. This proves that Kevin is Jose's untouchable!

He's getting 90 mins because Josh tweaked his groin in training yesterday. There is absolutely no significance to it at the moment.

Well to my understanding, that is different. For me, the number 10 is a position on the pitch, while a play maker is a role and an ability of the player.

Marco sure loves preseason, doesn't he? Let's hope he can take that form into the season this time around.

Keep in mind that Jose has not seen Mata yet. He might change his mind when he does.

The reason why he is not playing today is that he tweaked his groin in training yesterday. Should take part in our next game.

I hate it when terms from other sports are used in football. What exactly do you mean by play maker? We have a hand full of players that can create chances and "make play": Mata, Hazard, Oscar, Luiz, Lampard, KDB..etc and they can all be part of the team and create play. Why should we choose one?

How about this finish:

A few others are: Dani Alves, Materazi, Totti, Ferdinand (both of them), Yaya Toure...

He was probably just considered for the job but I highly doubt that they actually offered him the job and he turned it down.

My top three in order have to be: 1) Suarez 2) Busquets 3) Hunt

Don't be. A twitter account with even zero followers is 10 times more reliable than SkyItalia

So Strootman getting closer to signing with Roma means that we will sell Mikel to Turkey? Well, as long as we're not getting ahead of our selves..

Just the media putting 2 and 2 together.

Scored an absolute cracker yesterday with the U18s in their preseason.

Fair enough.

They're in the preliminary rounds for the CL as they finished second in the league last season.

Those are just trends among pundits. There is hardly any analysis in there. I bet half those article writers only watch the highlights of our matches at most. The opinions of our own fans account for much more, imo. Most our fans wanted Luiz tried in midfield before last season and by the end of it most of them were convinced that he can't play there and only belongs in defense because we saw his weaknesses there. In terms of why I think that experiment has failed, we've discussed this for a very long time in the past. Here is a previous post of mine that explains my point: http://forum.talkchelsea.net/topic/13527-04-david-luiz/?p=658954

He had more goals and assists on average playing from the back. And of course our win ratio was better because he only played there against weaker sides. The experiment was an absolute failure because he was constantly out of position, gave the ball away too easily and a bunch of other problems I won't get into again. I've already made these points countless times on here. It was evident for everyone that the performance of our midfield was terrible against any half decent side when Luiz played in there.

Here are a few examples that support the notion that Rooney has a better work rate than most forwards especially defensively. Here are the Squawka "action area" graphs from a couple of random matches he played at the tail of last season. Against Arsenal where he played as a striker: And in the 3-0 win against Villa where he played as an attacking midfielder: In comparison, here are a couple for Torres (from his better days here) in the 2-2 draw against Spurs and the 2-1 win against Everton in the last game: And finally in comparison to Ba from our 1-0 win against United (in the league): As you can clearly see, Rooney has a much bigger tendency to track back and defend. He spends a lot more time in his own half to help his team out most significantly in the area just outside his own box where you usually most need an extra man from attack to help you defend.

Haha. Fullbacks are the players that play on either the right or the left of the defense like Marcelo and Dani Alves. Center backs are just as the name implies.

How come he's a "former Chelsea footballer" when he does something bad?! He spent just as much time at united. If he were receiving an award I'm sure he would have been a former united footballer instead!