Jase

So, who was the one really who did the persuasion work? lol

Petr Cech Is in His Comfort Zone: In the Middle of Everything https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/sports/soccer/petr-cech-chelsea.html LONDON — Petr Cech does not watch a lot of television. Switching his brain off, by his own admission, does not come easily to him. He has always preferred, he said, to fill every minute of his day, not just with work and family but with a moderately intimidating litany of pastimes and projects. Settling down on the sofa counts, to his mind, as time wasted. This year, though, Cech and his wife, Martina, have started getting into “The Crown.” Even then, though, he is not the sort to allow himself to be washed away by the lavish Netflix melodrama. Each episode — he is somewhere in the middle of the second season — prompts him to go away and fill in the gaps in both his knowledge and the series’ contested historical authenticity. “Obviously it’s not completely accurate,” he said. “But there are lots of interesting things. You start Googling those parts of British history, and you realize there are lots of things you didn’t know.” That, just about, encapsulates Cech: He is inclined to see an hour or two of fairly mindless television in his rare downtime not as a chance to relax, but as a learning opportunity. That Cech has time to disappear down a rabbit hole about the Suez crisis — or anything else — is faintly remarkable. Spooling through all of the things he does, it is hard not to assume he is handcuffed by having a mere 24 hours in his day. He is studying for an M.B.A. He plays the drums well enough that last year he released a charity single with Roger Taylor of Queen. He is fluent in five languages — his native Czech, English, German, Spanish and French — but speaks seven. He admits, as if confessing to some great flaw, that he cannot write quite as well as he might like in Italian and Portuguese. He has started running, too; every so often he will knock out a quick 10K on a weekend morning. All of this, he said, means that his “time management has to be right.” These are extracurricular activities, after all. He also has a job to think about. Strictly speaking, in fact, he has two. Cech retired as a player in 2019 — after a decorated career spent at Rennes, Chelsea and, in his twilight, Arsenal. He made the decision before it was made for him; within a few months, he found that his “mind started to clear, that I had a new motivation, a new happiness.” He went back to the gym, reveling in the fact that his body — without “a big ball being fired at me at 60 miles an hour” hundreds of times every day — was recovering from the wear and tear it had endured. As far as he was concerned, his life as a player was over. He had plenty of job offers. The one that appealed the most was a post as technical director at Chelsea. He had been doing that for almost a year when the pandemic struck. Suddenly, he found himself dragged back to a life he thought he had left behind. “We were lucky to be able to finish the season,” he said. “But nobody knew how many players would get the virus, and we had really strict numbers and restrictions. Normally, if a player gets injured, you would take someone from the academy, but because we had to be in bubbles, that was not possible. “At one point, we were short a goalkeeper, so the solution was either I stepped in, or a goalkeeping coach did. I was fit, so I said OK.” It was intended as a precaution, a form of emergency cover, but Cech was still more than good enough to be a viable option. He was briefly registered on Chelsea’s squad list for the Champions League this season. His primary focus, though, what all of his other interests must swirl around, is his new role. Cech is — by English soccer’s standards — something of a rarity. In certain parts of continental Europe, and especially Germany, it is not unusual for high-profile players to eschew coaching and move into front-office roles immediately after retirement: Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Sar at Ajax; Leonardo at Paris St.-Germain; almost the entire off-field hierarchy at Bayern Munich. England is only now catching up. For the most part, where Premier League clubs employ a technical director, it is seen as a position for a recruitment specialist, someone who can navigate the choppy, unpredictable waters of soccer’s transfer market. Edu Gaspar, at Arsenal, and Cech, at Chelsea — both appointed last year, both with vast experience as top players — are exceptions. For Cech, the appeal of the job lies in how different it is from playing. He had thought in great depth about what he would do after he retired. He had, he said, realized after fracturing his skull in 2006 that “it took only a split second for everything to be finished.” He knew he had to be prepared. He studied for his coaching licenses while still playing — on international duty with the Czech Republic, he said, “there was always time” — but it occurred to him that coaches, essentially, live the same life as a player: “You spend time training, traveling, at games, in hotels. The routine is the same.” A front office role, by contrast, “allows me to be close to the game, but to organize things in a different way.” The challenge was that soccer the game and soccer the industry are distinct entities; a life in one does not wholly prepare you for a life in the other. Cech was, effectively, “starting from zero.” To some extent, what he has seen since has been eye-opening. Cech chose his agents at the age of 17; they still represent him now. He always made a point of knowing not only exactly what they were doing, but how they were doing it. He can see now, of course, that not every player is quite so thorough, and not every agent quite so transparent. “Lots of players leave things with the agent and carry on,” he said. “There are parts of football on this side that are very surprising, in a negative way.” For all that surprise, the early results suggest Cech is well suited to his new role. His playing career, as it turned out, was not entirely irrelevant. As a player, he was always involved with the various liaison committees that express the squad’s feelings to the club’s representatives. He feels, still, that he knows instinctively how players would react to certain suggestions. The luster his playing career carries can be an advantage, too. At one point this summer, he flew to Germany to meet with Kai Havertz, the playmaker Chelsea would eventually sign for $81 million. Cech impressed Havertz’s family not only with the depth of his analysis but his human touch: He spent as much time discussing raising children in London and his own memories of moving to England as a young player as he did the 21-year-old Havertz’s role on the team. His mere presence, though, helped persuade Havertz: He was impressed that the player he had seen winning the Champions League in 2012 would come to see him in person. His other skills have proved useful, too. Earlier this year, Chelsea was trying to figure out how to make headway with the signing of the German forward Timo Werner. Liverpool was circling, and Frank Lampard, the Chelsea manager, and the club’s recruitment department, led by Scott McLachlan, were eager to find an edge in the chase. Over lunch at the club’s training facility one day, Cech pointed out that he spoke German. What if he called Werner directly? Those involved with the deal point to it as the decisive moment. But there is something broader, too, that has smoothed Cech’s transition. The position of technical director varies from club to club and country to country. In Chelsea’s case, Cech is there to tie together the various strands of the club’s sporting vision, the linchpin between the first team, the academy and the recruitment department. The business side is handled by Marina Granovskaia, Chelsea’s director and its de facto chief executive. It is, in other words, the sort of job that requires someone used to balancing a whole host of different demands and needs and priorities. Someone given to thinking in four dimensions to make sure their many and varied commitments can all be met. Someone, like Cech, who does not, as he put it, “like to waste time.”

No Tyrone Mings for Villa against us on Monday. Sent off against Palace.

'The blame can be put on broadcasters': Lampard angry at festive fixture pile-up https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/25/chelsea-frank-lampard-angry-premier-league-festive-fixtures-arsenal-aston-villa

Yup. The question now is whether Aguero would be fit for the game.

What do you think?

Wonderful yet wasteful: Chelsea must unlock the best of Timo Werner https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/25/chelsea-best-timo-werner-frank-lampard Naturally the Germans have a word for it. They call it chancentod: literally, “chance death”. Being described as a chancentod doesn’t necessarily make you a bad player. It’s not a tag you’re stuck with for life. All it means is that at the moment, you possess an unerring and uncanny ability to squander whatever goalscoring opportunity is presented to you. Which, for all his manifold qualities, feels like a pretty good way of describing Timo Werner at Chelsea right now. To watch Werner of late is to be torn between pity and disbelief. The £52m summer signing has now gone nine club games without a goal in all competitions. But this isn’t your regular dry patch. Werner isn’t just not scoring. He’s dramatically, spectacularly not scoring. There was the fluffed one-on-one against West Ham on Monday night. A scarcely credible miss against Leeds when he somehow managed to not score from one yard out, with no goalkeeper. Numerous glorious openings scuffed, ballooned, gently rolled wide. According to Premier League stats, Werner has missed eight “big chances” this season. And yet, there are no visible signs of desperation or panic. Everyone from Chelsea fans to Frank Lampard to Werner himself seems satisfied that this is simply a lean patch, and that the form that earned him 28 Bundesliga goals for RB Leipzig last season – second only to Robert Lewandowski’s 34 – will return before long. This is almost certainly true. Even at his apparent worst, Werner is still a brilliant, horrific forward to play against: quick, clever and aggressive, with an elastic turn of pace and a good, pressing engine. But, in a way, Werner’s dry spell raises questions that go beyond simple issues of confidence and rhythm. Rather, by analysing how Werner is missing, Chelsea may just learn a thing or two about themselves in the process. The first thing to note before the Boxing Day game at Arsenal is that Werner has always been a curiously uneven striker. His first two seasons at Stuttgart brought seven goals in 62 games. Last year began with a run of one goal in eight games, and ended with 24 in 25. This season, he waited until October for his first league goal, then went on a run of seven goals in 17 days for club and country. Werner has always scored goals. But he tends to score them in clusters. This is the pact you enter into when you build your team around Werner: he misses chances that others don’t even create. The intelligence of his movement, his speed in transition, the ability to slip past a defender and get to the ball first: this is what ultimately makes him so devastating. But Werner is not a natural finisher in the way most of us imagine the term. Go through some of his attempts for Leipzig over the last few seasons and what stands out is the quirkiness of the technique. Werner strikes the ball unusually high on his foot, almost in the crook of his ankle. For this reason he tends to prefer the ball at his side, where he can wrap his leg around the shot, rather than in front of him. Struck sweetly, Werner’s shot is a thing of terror: a snappy, violent motion that offers in extreme power what it lacks in finesse and repeatability. But if the timing is a fraction out, he often comes over the top of the ball. He rarely scores with the instep. He rarely scores headers. He rarely scores curlers. While he misses a disproportionate number of easy chances, he also scores a disproportionate number of hard ones. Asked once to describe his finishing style, Werner replied: “Don’t think too much, and hope the ball goes in.” Now, perhaps, we see why Werner has needed a certain period of adaptation. Leipzig’s slingy counterattacking style, with its sweeping moves and quick interchanges, suited his see-ball-hit-ball game perfectly, allowing him to meet the ball in space and on the run. Cutting in off the left flank gave him the best opportunity of addressing the ball side-on. Chelsea, by contrast, come up more often against deep-set defences and move the ball more slowly than Leipzig in any case. Take Werner’s two big chances against West Ham, where he received the ball in a static position and thus struggled to get it out from under his feet. “It’s tougher than I thought,” he says of his start in English football. So how to get the best out of Werner? Julian Nagelsmann, his last manager, believes you need to start Werner deeper, even as a No 8, so he has momentum when he receives the ball. Initially Lampard deployed him as a centre-forward, later moving him to the left in order to accommodate Tammy Abraham. Abraham’s five goals and Werner’s four assists suggest it is working to a degree. Yet the suspicion remains that somewhere out there lies an even neater solution, that a player of Werner’s bespoke gifts demands a bespoke approach, something more creative than simply giving him a rest and hoping he comes good. Perhaps Werner is partially trapped in expectations. Signed in response to Lampard’s request for a proven goalscorer, his record suggested he would seamlessly fill that role. In fact, he is a far more complex player than that: a genuinely fascinating forward who defies easy categorisation. Not purely a poacher, not purely a creator, not purely a wide forward, but a puzzle: one that Lampard, an inexperienced coach still grappling with the riches at his disposal, is still trying to solve.

Seriously, who the hell cares about the other teams? Dropping points against out-of-form or poor sides can obviously happen but if we really want to challenge for the league title, if we really want to win it, then we need to be beating those sides way more often than not. Am sure there are more examples going back to Sarri's season, Conte's second season etc but here are some of our shockers under Lampard, including the opponents' form and league position pre-game: L 0-1 West Ham - 5 losses in 6 games; 17th in the table L 1-3 Everton - 8 losses in 11 games; 18th in the table L 0-1 Bournemouth - 1 win in 10 games, including 5 consecutive losses; 15th in the table L 0-2 Southampton - 2 losses in 3 games; 17th in the table D 1-1 Brighton - 5 losses in 9 games; 14th in the table L 0-1 Newcastle - 4 losses in 6 games; 13th in the table D 2-2 Arsenal - 2 wins in 15 games; 10th in the table D 2-2 Bournemouth - 12 losses in 16 games; 16th in the table L 2-3 West Ham - 8 losses in 11 games; 17th in the table --- D 3-3 West Brom - 19th in the table; 1 win all season. Do I need to say more? L 0-1 Everton - 9th in the table but 1 win in 7 games, including 4 losses L 1-2 Wolves - 10th in the table but 1 win, 3 losses in 5 games

Greetings, TC! Merry Christmas and an early Happy New Year! 2020 has been shit and suck for everyone but hopefully, 2021 will be much better and much better for Chelsea and us fans! Have a good holiday and stay safe!

Even Azpi got in on the act!

Arsenal team news... https://www.arsenal.com/news/team-news-aubameyang-martinelli-partey

https://www.espn.com/soccer/paris-saint-germain/story/4243177/psg-sack-manager-tuchel-on-christmas-eve-after-poor-start-to-season-sources PSG have reportedly sacked Tuchel and Pochettino is set to replace him.

Still assists at the end of the day. We can't complain about not scoring enough from set pieces or the failure to beat the first man from set pieces and then suddenly try to dismiss assists from set pieces.

Keep tempting fate and I might just do it.

Plastic fans should really be banned on here.

League Cup semi finals: Man United v Man City Spurs v Brentford

Also worth remembering that while Costa scored tons of goals in the two title winning seasons, he kinda went off the boil in the second half of both seasons. He tended to fade off after a strong start to the season. And not to mention, we don't need to get bad PR for his on the field behavior again. We already have enough other problems/worries as it is...

Has anyone noticed that United have won 7 of their last 8 domestic games, including 6 of the last 7 in the Premier League...?

You jinxed it, FB...

How often has this factor even come into play - be it our team or others? And in Luiz's case, he only played a pre-season under Lampard.

Knocking him off as in...? I get the need to prioritize but this game is still the most immediate one and let's not forget what happened in the 2017 and 2020 FA Cup finals. We went into those two as clear favorites but ended up losing both. One could argue that Arsenal are worse now but the same perspective applies here. We're expected to win this but will we win? Also worth remembering that we would have lost this fixture last season if it weren't for Leno's mistake and Arsenal went all Arsenal in the last few minutes of the game.

Any takers out there?