Chelsea Legend 11

I hear that, a B seems a little high seeing as we paid 31M for him. He's an attacker, he ends more end product for me. It was his first year but that's true for Schurrle as well who is younger.

Assuming I agree with you, what does that matter? He'll be playing with better players here too.

gonna download the Hoffenheim/Bayern game and see how he does in that. Whoscored gave him an 8.77 and he scored the equalizer. I'll let you guys know what I thought of him

How do you feel about him being converted to a deeper role? I say Oscar won't be supplanted as a 10 but if we play 4-3-3(which we tend to do in big games) Firmino could be the guy in the middle three who can help initiate the offense. Apparently he a decent tackler too.

I think you guys give the Prem way too much credit. He looks like a classy player and those types will find a way to score in any league.

What would you grade him as and why? I thought he was decent defending but didn't add as much as I'd like going forward. He's in his prime years too, needs to come back next year and bang in 10 goals.

Thanks fellas, I guess putting it in as an article made more sense. I do want to encourage you to challenge my reports though, it was meant to spark discussion.

I don't buy this league strength garbage, his technique is fucking off the charts! That will get him through any league.

Not as easy as just buying especially under FFP. We had Lamps, Essien, Mikel, Ramires etc under contract and most of them were bought to play 4-3-3 not 4-2-3-1. Besides I wasn't speaking about what we haven't bought but more to who we have. There haven't been many duds when Chelsea set out to buy someone. Anyways you may think you know what the club needs and to be quite frank you are entitled to your opinion but as spectators, not the decision makers, you need to understand that acquiring players isn't as easy as identifying a player and signing him. The Prem has strict Visa rules and also cannot engage in any 3rd party deals not to mention we have a squad of 23 men not 33 more often someone has to leave before someone comes in and with Chelsea's wages its extremely hard to move contracted players and make room for new ones... Not to mention agents and whether or no the player even wants to come here. Just be patient, a couple years in the life of a football club is nothing. Don't expect everything to be resolved in one fail swoop, in time things will all be done accordingly. Jose and the board know what they're doing, give them the time and space to operate under these new constraints is all I'm saying.

in buying the right players.

Well thankfully the decision makers at the club do know what they want and their record has been impeccable over the last 3 yrs. Costa isn't gonna solve all of our needs but he does address a fair few of them. This is a squad of 23 players not 11, Jose knows what type of striker we need to accompany someone like Lukaku or Costa, its why he pursued Rooney and why we ended up with Eto'o as a stop gap. I don't think the acquisition of Costa means we answered our striking needs it just ticks off one of the requirements.

okay you've clearly highlighted that Costa won't fit in this team now do you mind throwing out some names as to who you think would ideally satisfy our needs por favor?

Who is? and beyond that are those players even remotely available and within our budget? Listen I have no doubt that Costa isn't the complete forward most teams want but he is about the best striker that is available within our budget. We don't need a guy to link up play, dominate in the air, hold up the ball and play intricate one - twos with our attacking mids, what we need is a fox in the box type player who has the right sort of instincts to be in good positions to finish off chances. A poacher for you football manager types. We're not going to just sign one player to do everything, this is still a squad and what we lacked this season was a poacher of the highest order.

Depends on what you're looking for. Cavani is better at holding up the ball and I would say he's technically a little better too. Costa doesn't really hold up the ball at all and is often guilty of giving away the ball. Oddly enough Torres was better than both of them, in limited time albeit, at winning aerials.

If the rumoured fee of 32M is correct than we're getting what we paid for. Just last year Cavani went for 55M and Falcao for 51M? where does Costa rank amongst them?

please stop posting this unsubstantiated bullshit.

Luiz left alone at the top of the 18 is speculative? hmm... Hazard dancing in alone doesn't count as a chance creation? hmmm... Ya agree to disagree we didn't have a fabulous game but like I said we did enough to win had we been more clinical. Torres is just never alive in the box, he seems to always be on his heels, the Hazard rebound is a good example of that, but ya agree to disagree.

-Schurrle off the post -Luiz off the bar -Schurrle pen appeal -Hazard shot in the box Torres rebound.

Are we talking about chances CREATED or chances CONVERTED? And yes you are correct not every chance is going to fall to the striker but as I've also said our attacking mids score more goals than pretty much any squad in the Prem. We're mincing words here anyway, I just don't buy this argument that we don't create enough chances, we do, they just haven't been converted at a reasonable clip.

No I think vs Norwich we generated enough chances to win it had we been more clinical. As far as the other part of your post goes I'm not disagreeing with you, you've completely omitted the most important part of my post which is we aren't going to win every game. The chances created can't be limited to games we've drawn or lost.

I disagree, firstly to only highlight games where we dropped points is a mistake when you are looking at chances created to goals scored. There are many more games where we had zillions of chances and only converted one of them. of the games that you highlighted I'd say the West Brom games and Crystal Palace(where the pitch was horrible) were the games we rightfully did not deserve to get anything out of. That doesn't really matter though we are never gonna win 38 games out of 38 we will drop points, the point I'm making is we stand a better chance winning games if we have a guy who is capable of putting away the many chances we do create. It not only creates more space for our attacking mids but when the game gets tight, as we've seen on many occasions, a goal can relieve pressure and allow us to rest guys for another day.

but they were chances and a good amount of them WERE quality. Bottom line is until we get someone who is capable of finishing off some of the chances we fashion we'll never know what type a team we have. A great deal of goals we've scored this year have come from our attacking midfielders which is exactly the opposite to the teams that have scored the most goals this year.

The key to me is he can score a variety of ways, left foot, right foot, header. Watching his goals this year I couldn't really tell if he was left footed or right footed. Thats a good thing.

So many games this year were like this. Fewer chances but the same deal

This is the type of thing I was angling at in my post. Loads of box presence and absolutely no finishing. Costa hopefully will aid in games like this. In the big matches I have no problem playing counter attacking football.