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The problem is without a similar threat down the left hand side, and Reece struggling to stay fit for a solid run of games this season, we do become predictable out wide because our full backs aren't good enough. It also then means the wide players and/or Mount are more likely to stay or drift wide too to help the full backs attack those spaces. The likes of Man City and Liverpool's full backs attack and exploit the spaces left by the wide players cutting in and going into the box and ours don't seem to do that currently. Couldn't agree more about the final statement. It's easy to be critical of the likes of Mount and Tammy at present when they're struggling a bit but both scored important goals and were key players when we were playing well. It almost feels like we're leaning on the likes of them to get us out of this hole when in reality they need the experienced players to step up. Unfortunately the likes of Jorginho, Kovacic and Willian aren't playing at the level they were earlier in the season, and Kante is having an overall pretty poor season. Some of these have to show their mettle and personality on this team to get us out of this slump of form.

Personally I believe it's more to do with the mentality of the team at present not confident in themselves than the training because earlier in the season showed us capable of everything you've said. I'm not too concerned with Reece James being one of our biggest weapons. You could argue Liverpool's main creative weapon over the last couple of years has been Trent within a similar age bracket to Reece. I don't mind getting the ball into the box from wide positions when we're packing the box. If the full backs are crossing in at the very least we need 3, ideally 4 players in the box attacking the crosses. We regularly only have Tammy isolated in the box. When you only have one player to aim for most of the time it's not going to be as successful as it should be. That's an area that Lampard needs to work on the players desire and mentality to attack the box and think more directly. He's ironically the best player I've seen timing his runs into the box to get on the end of chances and he needs to be working on some of the players to try and learn and understand this trait. I do think once we show some form of a threat from wide areas it makes teams think twice about just pushing us wide and helps to open up the possibilities of attacking and creating more in central areas. Good final point on how the players look jaded. One thing I would imagine Lampard would demand is hard work and intense training sessions.

I'm pretty sure we're the worst in the league or certainly amongst the bottom teams for goals conceded in the last 15 minutes of games this season. A lot of this will likely come from a combination of our players tiring and fading from the constant pushing we're having to do to try and score, and also the encouragement we're offering opposition to take the game to us in the final quarter of the game for not taking our chances and killing games off. But even then that's when some character and leadership should come into play and unfortunately at present we don't have enough of it in this team.

I think it comes from a panic of being unable to break a team down that play deep. We usually start games well for the first 20-30 minutes and look bright but once we get past that initial period if we can't break a team down that structure seems to be lost. There's probably a bit of being naive from both players and Lampard with this, but the players seem to get their confidence drained if we can't make our domination count. Since the international break we have struggled badly for confidence and it's really frustrating why we haven't been able to pick back up our form from prior to this. Some players look jaded and may be carrying knocks, and others are just woefully out of form. It's also becoming less of a coincidence that our bad form has come with Kante's return too because I think a lot of those attacking patterns and passing through the lines came from Jorginho and Kovacic and the partnership they had built up together. I think for the most part Rudiger coming back has improved our defence and we do look more solid than we did earlier in the season, although there are still some inexcusable individual mistakes. But when we're not scoring goals and killing teams off it will naturally invite pressure and encouragement to the opposition. A keeper that struggles to save shots too doesn't help with keeping many clean sheets. I'm hoping that this winter break we have may be what we need to take stock of the situation, get some players back properly fit and firing again. Lampard needs to try and find that formula back earlier in the season when we were at the very least putting the bottom 12-14 teams to the sword. If we had continued doing that over the last couple of months we'd probably be in 2nd place, about 15-18 points clear of 4th.

He's still well regarded in Spain but beyond Barca and Real the options are very thin. If we could convince Oblak to join a new project and challenge then it's possible we may be able to set up a swap deal of some sort with Atletico to mitigate a large portion of the cost but like you said any other clubs in Spain are unlikely to pay both big money and big wages and don't really have outstanding goalkeeping options for us to try to broker some sort of deal with.

You've just completely contradicted yourself. If Tammy struggles with 90 minutes then what is the alternative at the moment besides bringing Bats on in his place? Bats is terrible but in my opinion he is more likely to get a goal than Giroud. Our options aren't good enough and take Tammy out the team we haven't got anyone I'd be confident in to score on a semi-regular basis, let alone regular basis. Lampard says every press conference we need more goals in our team so at the very least he can identify like all of us can it's a major problem for us struggling to win games at the moment. If he and the board think we can get someone in to change that this month then let's do it. Otherwise a half hearted attempt to fix the solution doesn't help us in the long term when proper quality needs adding to this squad of players.

The biggest issue we have is scoring enough goals to kill teams off or get the odd goal to win a tight game. I struggle to see how any other coach would help this situation with our attacking options once Hazard left. Take Tammy out who is still young and inexperienced at the highest level (and had similar issues in the Championship with regards to needing a few chances to score) and we have no goalscorers in this team. Plan A earlier in the season of dominating teams and playing through them worked superbly with Jorginho and Kovacic, but now teams have realised to plug the gaps in the middle and force us wide we don't have the players to play this way. Reece James hasn't stayed fit to play a regular run of games yet this season, but if he was fit and a high quality left back was purchased that would make a huge difference because we'd suddenly have two full backs capable of making the by-line and having a good delivery. That in turn will also allow the wide players and a Mount/Barkley/hopefully RLC to be much more direct and be crowding the opponents box. At the moment our full backs aren't good enough which means our wide players are playing wider and not narrower. So when the ball comes in, we usually have Tammy in the box and nothing else. It may not completely solve things, because our wide players have to be hungry and selfish enough to be getting into the box and getting goals. I think Pulisic and CHO could probably do this over time but again it's needing time and patience still for players to develop that trait to their game, much like someone like Sterling has over the last couple of years because he wasn't that type of player at Liverpool.

Spot on. Klopp would never have lasted at Chelsea with his initial time in the first couple of seasons at Liverpool. Even up to 18 months ago, despite Salah having a Ronaldo/Messi esque season and spending £80m on Van Dijk mid-season they were still only just scraping 4th back then. He's an outstanding coach but it's easy to forget the patience he has enjoyed at Liverpool to reach this point. He had similar problems defensively to what we have now. A leaky defence, amateur mistakes, goalkeeping errors. He didn't coach that out of the side he went and spent the best part of £150m to fix that issue. There are areas defensively we can do better on and areas that Lampard has to coach this team to improve, but the only way basic errors and mistakes are going to be removed is either being confident enough that the players making them are young enough to cut them out in time and in that situation you almost have to ride them out. I think in the case of Tomori and James you can make a case for that but not the rest of the defence and midfield. Or you replace them. Even with the transfer ban lifted, January is not the window to make huge changes but this summer Lampard has to start putting his own stamp on this team and be ruthless.

The criticism being levelled at Lampard is way over the top given the struggles someone far more experienced like Sarri had with this squad. Where Sarri could fall back on is when teams cottoned on to how we were playing and we started getting blitzed regularly, he made us much more defensively solid but just slow and tedious on the ball. But he had a match winner in Hazard. I'm sure the stat last season was something like without Hazard's goals we'd have been in the bottom half. You put Hazard back in this team and we'd easily have 6-8 more points, probably more because these tight games we're failing to win or kill off is where his importance is highlighted.

Mistakes and errors are killing us just as much as a lack of cutting edge this season. Arsenal going down to 10 men and keeping things solid, it was always going to be hard to break them down whether they had 10 men or not because these struggles are happening over and over, but cut the mistakes out and we'd still be winning this game. That first goal should never, ever happen. Kante's slip is horrendous but the naive attitude within the players to leave such an easy counter from our own corner is inexcusable. Especially when the likes of Azpi, Rudiger, Willian and Jorginho are on the pitch. Somebody should be taking the lead there on the pitch and unfortunately there seems to be no one prepared to assume that role.

My view on Lampard is the same as to what it was in the summer when he was my first choice to replace Sarri. The position that the club was in with the transfer embargo, losing Hazard, etc, it needed a manager that was willing to make big decisions which may have short term ramifications to build and establish a longer term plan for the club. Lampard would be prepared to do this because he wants the club to be successful whether he's manager or not. If Sarri had stayed or another continental manager had come in, I'm 90% sure that they would have leaned on the experienced players to get us through this season - Luiz, Azpi, Alonso, Pedro, Willian, Giroud. We would have come out of this season with half our first team the wrong side of 30 and the squad in desperate need of refreshing. The injection of the young players into the side has helped freshen things up this season and it doesn't look anywhere near as stale. Of course we still need some signings in key areas but the squad feels in a much better position than it did 6 months ago. Whether Lampard is the right man to continue to improve us and get us back to winning trophies and challenging for the league again is up for debate because he's still so inexperienced himself. There's an inconsistency about him and a number of high points balanced out with low points this season, very similar to our younger players. I think like our younger players he needs time and patience and as long as there is a form of progression over time, I don't see any reason why the club shouldn't give him at least a couple of seasons to try and build and mould this team and the younger players in the squad when Liverpool and City are comfortably the two dominant teams in the league, and not likely to change over the next couple of years at least. But what I hope at the very least what Lampard has done is shifted the culture of the club to not be afraid to give the academy players opportunities and look to integrate them into the first team. It's a key component to being able to be more aggressive in the transfer market over the next coming windows.

We paid £18m didn't we for Giroud under similar circumstances? £10m isn't a bad deal at all. Obviously his wages would be pretty high I'd imagine but we've moved some big earners from the wage bill over the last 12 months. I've been very vocal about not wasting money in this transfer window to give ourselves the strongest position possible to make moves in the summer but I wouldn't see a huge deal of risk in this. If he struggles, I assume we'd be able to move him on again in the summer, probably to Atletico for a few million and buy a new striker then. But if he does well we may view the striking position with Tammy and Cavani to be fine to move into next season and allow us to focus on other needs in our squad in the summer. We can then move on a striker the following summer when hopefully we have less holes in our squad by then.

None will be a guarantee at that age, not even Reece. We only have to look at the manager, someone who looked nowhere near the player he would become until he was 24/25. I think at the very least, and what @Tomo is saying is all of the younger players have shown in stages this season (or last season for RLC and CHO) that they are capable of performing at this level and being big important factors in Chelsea winning games, it's just not on a consistent enough basis at present (and that would include Pulisic into that bracket also). The hope is that consistency will come with experience but if it doesn't I think what this season has at least shown is the club can be confident now to lean far more on the academy in the future compared to previously. If some of these players never reach their full potential all of them have proven at the very minimum they can be solid Premier League players and offer depth as squad players. In turn this will stop us forking out small fortunes on players such as Drinkwater and Zappacosta. That summer we really should have kicked on but chose quantity over quality and look how far back we are now. Instead of spending £75m on Drinkwater and Bakayoko we would have been better served giving RLC more chances and spending top dollar on a higher quality midfielder. Instead we sold a first choice midfielder and let RLC out on loan who performed well enough at Palace to go to the World Cup and we were left with two midfielders who turned out to be a living nightmare. This time 6 months ago most of us were looking at our squad and it seemed easier to count how many players were good enough to keep rather than how many were not, but with the influx from the academy and some of the positive contributions they've made this season I think if we can add 2 or 3 top quality players over this window and the summer and another couple the following summer we'll hopefully be in an extremely strong position to take advantage of City and Liverpool then needing to start making changes to sides who's mostly best players will be on the wrong side of 30 by then. City and Liverpool are well ahead of the pack at present and therefore it makes even more sense over the next couple of seasons to build slowly and quietly and see just how far some of these players can reach.

It would be a strange scenario but if Atletico can't agree a deal with PSG for this month then I suppose there is a possibility. PSG may want him out if he wants to leave anyway and agree a deal with us for a loan for the remainder of the season. Perhaps we can trade them Giroud on loan in exchange. That way they still retain depth in their squad with someone who could probably do a decent job for them and get more game time than he does here. Unless a real top target for us comes available for the right price, then a loan deal to improve our options at present is the best case scenario for us. We can't afford to be seen wasting transfer budgets any more.

It's hardly like for like though. If we were talking RLC then I'd agree but Kovacic isn't going to play as advanced as Mount and that essentially means replacing an offensive minded player for a deeper player which I don't think is the answer against the likes of Newcastle. Barkley could maybe play there but I think he's shown in recent times that he's actually better suited to playing deeper where he can pick the ball up with time facing in front of him. I'm all for a midfield three of Kante, Kova and Jorginho against the big teams and trying to be a little more solid, but against the rest of the league who will mostly sit back and try to contain us it is far less effective. I think the question marks around Kante's suitability in these sorts of games is more of a topic. Our run at the start of the season coincided with Kante's absence and I think Lampard should go back to trying Kova and Jorginho for these types of games. Earlier in the season Mount seemed to be finding it much easier to find pockets of space which likely stems from playing in front of the two best passers in our team who could find him quickly and decisively.

Definitely a key component in that team. They're defensive record in recent weeks has taken a bit of a hammering too. But a number of players seem to have lost some form too offensively in recent weeks. Without Vardy firing, they seem to be in a similar position to us wondering where all the goals are going to come from to put teams away.

I don't think anybody believes that we don't need to strengthen long term, but it's not impossible for us to reach the top 4 this season without strengthening when we've been in the top 4 most of the season so far and nobody beneath us has yet shown to be capable of mounting a run of form like we showed earlier in the season (and add to that United and Spurs have both lost their main attacking player now for a large period of the rest of this season). Ideally it would be great to get one or two players in to help the charge, but it has to be right. We can go and buy a Zaha or Dembele now and pay big money for them but we will then be stuck with them next season and unable to pursue players who were our first choice targets for those positions. We are not going to spend £80m on Zaha this window and then pursue Sancho for £100 - 120m in the summer. The likes of Zaha and Dembele would more than likely be attainable in the summer regardless of whether we're in the top 4 or not, so if we can't get our first choice targets then we can move on the likes of these players anyway. I think a left back could be brought this window because I believe there are better options available than Chilwell, especially value for money, but it seems that he is our first choice. We're not going to be dropping over £300m across the next two transfer windows unless there was a big sale in the summer to go with Hazard's from last summer. It's nothing to do with us being poor, it's complying with FFP.

That is the biggest issue with this. A great keeper is worth his weight in gold (Cech is testament to this) and we are in desperate need for a left back. Having a duel threat from our full backs should theoretically have a big effect on our ability to break teams down because it will give opposition another weapon to attempt to nullify rather than just trying to pack the middle and push us out wide. But in regards to transfer fees, they are two of the worst positions to make a mistake because the general trend is they won't command transfer fees like other positions. We've gotten away with a mistake like Morata because teams are more likely willing to overpay for an attacking player who is more likely to 'make the difference'. I would much rather we pursue an alternative option than Chilwell.

I agree. I don't think Chilwell is a terrible player. I think he's a pretty good player and he's still very young and should continue to develop and improve. His recent form has been pretty dreadful but has also coincided with Leicester's loss of form and is no different to some of our younger players going through a period of inconsistency this season. The biggest worry I have with Chilwell is how much are we paying for the quality he's already proven and how much for potential? If he was £40 - 50m I wouldn't have much of a problem. But £70 - 80m gives you absolutely no leeway to get this wrong in this position. Much like we're seeing now with Kepa where we identified a player we thought had huge potential but ended up overpaying to get him; now he's not yet realising that potential we have to persevere with him and hope he continues to improve because we'll never recoup anywhere near the fee we paid out because Kepa hasn't proven enough yet to justify such a fee. Chilwell, for me, is in the same bracket.

The only thing unfortunate is this seems to be a typical comment from Chelsea fans on forums and social media, overreacting to everything. When they were all playing well at the start of the season they were hyped beyond belief and now they're struggling they're all viewed as not good enough for the club. The reality is they are all somewhere in the middle. It's far too early to make judgements on any of them. They have all shown this season periods where they are all capable of being very good Premier League footballers, and rightly should be viewed as very good potential players for the long term future of this club. The problem is fans nowadays aren't prepared to give time and patience to allow them to develop. This isn't just a problem at Chelsea, it's football in general nowadays but we are one of the worst for it when we've experienced unprecedented levels of success in the last 15 years through a policy which is purely short termism. Tomori was doing really well earlier in the season and I do believe long term he has all the attributes to be a mainstay in our defence but he did start making some mistakes and his form went off the boil. These players all need to experience that and the harsh realities playing Premier League football that if you're not at your best week in week out you will drop points and lose games. Lampard had the luxury with Rudiger returning to bring Tomori out of the side. Same goes for CHO who was struggling, but now looks like he is getting some sharpness back in recent games after a spell as a sub. At the moment though James, Mount and Abraham have to play because there are no alternatives without sufficiently weakening our team. James is the only full back we have capable of offering an offensive output. With Pulisic and RLC out and Pedro a shadow of the player he once was, the options to bring Mount out are limited. Barkley looks poor as a number 10 and seems more suited to playing deeper and the only other option is to play a midfield 3 instead which takes away from our offensive game in a period when we're struggling for goals. I believe if RLC had been fit this season the two would have rotated the role and Mount would have not played as much and stayed fresh. With Abraham the options to replace him at the moment are even worse. i would question more why we have more experienced players in the squad who should now be stepping up when these younger players need them to but are seemingly incapable of doing so. It's pretty damning how reliant we've become on our younger players this season to 'step up' and as a result take the brunt of criticism when they don't.

He and Hazard also gave a lot of mixed messages in the media about staying or going. One interview he'd talk about going back to Madrid for family reasons, and another interview he'd say he could stay in London for a few more years and move back to Madrid at the end of his career. Yes it was always likely that he would go but it's never a given. There are lots of examples that players or clubs perform a u-turn when it looks unlikely. As I said, the club took a calculated risk letting him play another year of his contract out but I believe at the time it probably felt the right call because he was one of the best around.

Easy to look at this now in hindsight I think but the club probably still felt there was a good chance of getting Courtois to re-sign with 2 years left on his deal. It's a calculated risk in my opinion when you have one of the best in the world in their position and at an excellent age at the club and trying to retain their services. Kepa may have ended up a bit of a panic buy in the end but from what it appears our number one target was Alisson and number two was Oblak who both rejected us. Then, again, if reports are to be believed we made a choice that we'd keep Courtois the extra season and let him leave on a free and re-assess the following season. Again, not possible once Courtois started to force the move (and in hindsight a good move after the ban in the summer window) When some of the other names we were being linked to were the likes of Butland and even Joe Hart, could you imagine the meltdown if we sold Courtois and brought one of these in to replace? Kepa clearly isn't a mug. He's highly regarded in Spain, with a lot of people preferring him over De Gea and Real Madrid made a move for him before Courtois. But he hasn't played well for a while and it does create a big problem, as you've pointed out, with the commitment made on him it almost has to be followed through now because no club is going to pay the fee we did for him. I think the most damning indictment of him at present is any shot in or around our box at present I'm not confident of him saving, even fairly standard ones.

It's easy to panic after results like today, but I really hope that Lampard and the club remain calm like he said in his press conference this week and only buy if the price and opportunity are right in this window. The best players, unless it is very exceptional circumstances, are simply not available in January and/or not willing to change clubs mid-season. We cannot afford to settle on players in this window based on availability over quality. The 2017 summer window, followed by the 2018 January window feels like it pushed the club back 3-4 years. Besides Rudiger and Barkley, the rest have already been bombed out on loan, struggling to offload or are no more than squad players currently who we'd be happy to offload. We're nowhere near as strong in the transfer market as we once were and with FFP, etc mistakes are much more difficult to absorb. We have a high quality academy that we're finally starting to bear some fruit from but this will take time. At the very least though it has shown this season that the squad can lean on these players to provide depth and hopefully in time develop into high quality players. What that should allow us to do is stop buying stop gaps, squad fillers and panic buys and instead focus on a couple of high quality additions each summer who will instantly lift the entire club. This is not going to happen in this window and if we blow big transfer fees with a short term view this month, then they won't happen in the summer either.

I'd say the opposite. Conte signed Morata for Juventus before he left so was clearly someone he wanted to coach. Zappa got a couple of caps under him, and when the Ox deal broke down late on it seems funny how we moved on so quick to an alternative which was Italian playing in Serie A. Drinkwater was linked with us the season Conte first came in when we brought Kante, so the links had already been there a season early. And for someone as bad as Baka was, I cannot see him being an anti-Conte signing and playing that many games under him when he was so useless.

I think the better option is to be able to find a higher quality player who is versatile enough to play different roles (lone striker, second striker, out wide) and therefore won't necessarily be "backup quality" and instead first team quality getting plenty of game time due to rotation and suitability across the front line. I've mentioned it before, but in my opinion, Anelka was really underappreciated by a large proportion of the fan base during his time here. He was an easy scapegoat at times but he sacrificed much of his game to play out wide for the majority of games and we were pretty successful during this period. But where his additional value came into play was we didn't miss Drogba very often when he was unavailable due to injury, Afcon, etc because Anelka was a top quality central striker. He top scored in the whole league in the Scolari/Hiddink season when Drogba struggled for form and fitness and besides probably United and Liverpool at the time, he would have walked into any other team in the league as their main striker. Since he left, we've never had an alternative striking option anywhere near his quality and in some years, our main striking option wasn't anywhere near his quality either. The obvious option I think when you think of someone of this ilk has to be Werner because of his ability to play multiple roles across the attack and he offers different strengths and characteristics to Tammy in the same way that Drogba and Anelka differed. As most have mentioned Werner will be in huge demand in the summer so there's no guarantee we'll get a clear run at him. But there must be other players across the continent that can offer something similar in case he's a no go.