Jase

It's silly either way. Whether he had done well or badly in that 20 minutes, it's no indication he'll go on to do well or badly in the season. So why judge on such a short cameo? The lack of patience here is ridiculous and people seem to have forgotten that for most of the minutes, we were playing with 10 men and playing conservatively.

Okay, I'm not entirely convinced Morata is the right striker for us but can we at least wait until he plays a few games with proper minutes before judging him? All the reaction after today's game seems to be born out of paranoia more than anything else.

It's funny. If we have a good pre-season, people would say it's only pre-season and don't read too much into it. If we have a bad one, people suddenly panic and start to react like it's the end of the world. Yes, we haven't had a good pre-season for various reasons but it's not necessarily an indication of what will happen, is it? We had a perfect pre-season under AVB but went on to be rubbish under him (before the unthinkable happened). And I would rather wait till after Aug 31 before judging our transfer window. It's silly to overreact when there's still 3 more weeks and especially if we ended up signing players before the transfer window closes.

If people are already reacting badly to a glorified friendly loss, I can't imagine the reaction if we don't beat Burnley next weekend...

Chelsea 2-3 Burnley PRE/POST-MATCH DISCUSSION, LIVE CHAT AND ANALYSIS 2017/18 Premier League Match 1 12th August, Saturday, 2017 Stamford Bridge 15:00 Kick Off (UK time)

Thought we played decently but good god, that was a shit shootout from us! What was the logic in having Cahill and Courtois as our first two penalty takers? Where were Luiz, Fabregas or even Azpi?!

Álvaro Morata, Chelsea’s new Mr Nice, wants to be Antonio Conte’s beast

Christ! How does saying "starting to think" equate to making an outright statement on the point? And if you had even bothered reading the other posts in Courtois' thread during that time, you would know the main wasn't even about him being overrated.

Err, where did I say Courtois was overrated???

Not my fault if you can't understand it...

HOW DID I FALL FOR THAT?!

Apparently not? http://www.chelseafc.com/news/latest-news/2017/08/conte--starting-strongly.html Did Conte forget to mention Pedro in his injury update or was the comment above only meant to explain the possibility of playing both Batshuayi and Morata together?

Also, we can complain all we want about Cahill but it doesn't look as if Conte will be dropping him any time soon unless he puts in a 1/10 performance every game! Azpi is vulnerable in the air but the funny thing is, he was only really caught out against Spurs, wasn't it? Coped well in the other games, especially when we also played with another short defender to his right.

I'm 50-50 on seeing Luiz in midfield again but I would think that's an option Conte might be considering if we're going to sign Van Dijk. Gives him option to shift things around. Otherwise, that signing would be rather pointless. Did I say that Conte being admirer of Drinkwater meant he had to be signed first over anyone else? No. All I said was, if Conte really wanted him, which is what Jim White seemed to be alluding to, then we would have gone for him a lot earlier or at least heard about this interest some time ago. Why this only appear now? If I'm being skeptical, signing Drinkwater is the club's idea and they have leaked out info to the press to make it look as if it's a Conte signing and not theirs. Also not making the move earlier until we sold Matic is plain silly. We already knew early last month that Matic wasn't going to be part of Conte's plan and was going to be sold. We should have bought his replacement in sooner and if we had been smart, we would have done that. Get the wanted played in, then sell the unwanted player. We would be in a good situation then. Instead, we have left ourselves in a situation where everyone knows we need another midfielder and other clubs will try milk as much money as possible for us, especially when we're only 3 weeks away from the end of the transfer window. If the worst situation had happened and Matic's move broke down after signing Drinkwater, we would have 5 midfielders and that's not a bad thing is it with Conte talking about the lack of squad depth? Last season, we were fortunate to survive with only 3 midfielders plus a few backups in Chalobah and Loftus-Cheek. This season, we will likely be less fortunate, will play more games and the backups are already gone. Conte isn't deluded to think we can survive with only 3 midfielders again.

Or perhaps Conte isn't really keen on using youth players. The comment from him about young players aren't patient enough is just weird to say the least.

Are we supposed to believe Conte is a big admirer of Drinkwater all of a sudden? If he was, we would have gone out to sign him a lot earlier rather than wait till now! This Van Dijk interest doesn't make sense either. Why would we need another CB? Only reason I can think of is we are failing to sign other targets and so, we get Van Dijk and start shifting players into other positions (e.g. Luiz into midfield or Azpi to RWB).

If we sign top quality players, they wouldn't want to play every week too? You have a point there but Conte can't complain about squad depth if he's the one unable to guarantee some of those players adequate playing time. In any case, yes, Abraham, Aina and RLC need game time and are rightly sent out on loan. But for Ake and Chalobah, should we have done better to persuade them to stay? I guess in Ake's case, it's difficult since it's either him or Christensen. But Chalobah? Matic is gone and we have more games to play this coming season, surely there's a big role for him to play? Get the feeling that Musonda and Boga are kept as backups because we are prioritizing other areas and aren't going to buy attacking players upfront.

Ironic of him to say the squad is small when he opted not to keep some of the younger players.

He recalls THAT night in Munich.

Benayoun, Sturridge, Mata, Cech, Matic. Who's next?

@Amblève., stay away from the alcohol!