Leif

Outside of Azpi, Luiz, Kante & Hazard, our identity is now carried by half-hearted amateurs.

Cahill probably feared a penalty would be awarded. All players rush to pick up opposition players regardless of the whistle if they believe they've just thrown themselves to the ground. Still, stupid, but he's umm, at least 'trying' to do right.

Nobody is questioning any of that. People are discussing a much bigger picture.

Our board don't allow any 'coach' to be manager with the ability to bench our most expensive & marketable players on a whim. When you consistently have issues with expensive strikers regardless of the coach, the finger has to be pointed at those who've outlasted and preceded the coach. The board; the same board who barely invested in us last summer. On top of that, I only realised the obvious last night - Conte was never a rotation man. Serie A didn't demand it. He'd stick to his guns & the same XI week in week out, and it worked over there. We haven't brought in a man fluent in rotation.

When nothing makes sense, consider the cynical; Conte knew we weren't winning before kick off. It's rigged, and Courtois won't even be unfit. Plausible deniability is all that is.

#SaveUsHiddink

abysmal is just the phrase 'lamb-say' rearranged. fun fact.

Is it technically possible to sub Conte on or does he have to be registered for the PL season specifically as a player?

all of our ideas are the same we just keep repeating the same thing over and over until the other team glitches we try and break their system instead of playing our own where is the style where is the love

i want to cut myself

As I said just the other day, - every single time - we have an absent face from the XI we turn into headless chickens. It's pathetic. Something is missing. Or some force in the board is flexing too much authority over the idea that the same 11 faces have to get preciously pampered and played while every other player is frozen out of chemistry-building games.

I'm more impressed so far by Matic than I have been any game all season.

the beauty has already happened - a reminder that Azpi is the best defender in Europe, if not just for his versatility.

BEAUTY FOLLOWS DISASTER IS MY NEW MADE UP MOTTO

What happens if we & Tottenham finish the season with the same amount of points, and the same goal difference? Do we win since C comes before T in the alphabet? Do our ultras face off in a battle royale?

The difference between winning / losing the title might come down to Begovic what a season.

From day 1 until even before our game today, he's struck me as having a pathetic mentality for a top team, and it eats at me. A, 'I'm lucky just to be taking part - lucky just to be competing against the best in Europe!' mentality. No desire to be nor any self belief in being truly great. Not even good enough for Tottenham; his potential is Everton. For anyone who agrees with me, it's like having stakes in a top company, which by default needs everything to go flawlessly, and as a shareholder knowing that the slightly retarded, Make a Wish Foundation kid is still manning an important role even after being given his sympathy month on the job. Let's get back to the real world now; you can't let someone do what they want forever just because they're a chummy lad, especially when there are experts at much smaller companies wasting away, experts who could elevate your company to a truly elite status. Little Johnny would find himself work at a new company, no doubt one of big clout despite his lack of expertise, because that's what being associated with the best does - it creates a halo-effect - which Cahill is currently blessed to have disguising his inadequacy. I'll never believe my eyes when people pretend that him being English isn't the only reason he hasn't been exiled. Make him Colombian and he'd have been sold 2 years ago.

I have to raise and hammer home this point again - Lose just this 1 game, and Tottenham win just 1 game, and it's a 1 point difference between us. We had our posts earlier in the season of 'is this really good enough?' and some people (+me), being called stupid & spoiled for expecting more. Well I still do, and so I still am. Never should a team have 10x the riches, 10x the experience, 10x the manager yet fail to leave their pint-sized cousins in the dust. To not be up in arms about this is dangerous. Someone's head has to roll. Not good enough. From the run we went on, matching a streak, to being the only team in Europe with a 10+ point lead, to this, to have slipped down to a neck-and-neck fight. Every other league winning team that goes on a run like we did wraps up the title a month and a half early. At this rate, if we win the league, it's the least triumphant Premier League title win since the competition started. If Tottenham win, it's a huge deal for them, but at the same time, City/United/Arsenal have all been woeful, Europe League-tier teams this season, and even they'll know that winning the title in the 2016/2017 season was a simple task. Which further illustrates that we've had nothing to go up against this season, no mighty teams at all, no truly underdog situations, but yet we are here, trying to fight hard just to stay 1st. To not demand better is to accept this is good enough; but this will not be good enough at all in the coming seasons with the teams around us building with more foresight than we use. There's no point in even going into how much superior the likes of Bayern, Juve & the top 2 in Spain are. We're physically retarded & unable to reach our next level if next season we have Matic, Cahill, & Bats still here. They're not worthy of being bench players; they're the players who've genuinely cultivated the most mistrust in the squad, from Conte's lack of faith in Bats, to Cahill being an own-goal merchant with an addiction to backing off his man, to Matic either giving a 3.5 or 6.5 performance, you never know which you'll get. This lack of faith makes things tricky. Alonso & Moses can at least be trusted to have more good games than bad, as can Costa. With foresight, we can cut out the future and currently very subtle but growing cancers and be all the better for it, instead of focusing so deeply on fixing the smaller bruises we have (Costa, Terry, our fullbacks.) No team on the level we should aspire to be on would take any of Cahill, Matic or Bats - for free. It's sickening that we're clawing our way back to being a top team still, and the reason we're still crawling not there yet is because of the more subtle, but more important power-moves being completely ignored. We don't need more good players, we need less subpar players. There's no point putting the best icing in the world on an absolutely average-ass sponge.

They haven't beaten us in 13 games, amazing.

The melting pot of talent proposed to be in France right now, is nothing compared to the undocumented going-ons of Serie A. The difference is, Serie A's talents are sprinkled from the league leaders to those who're definitely going to be in Serie B next season. France's talents are already at the top clubs in the league. Mbappe is the one player in France that has no equal in Italy or even Spain or England. But all these other Monaco & co players in France we're drooling over, they definitely have equals in Italy, who'd both cost a lot less, and, impress us all the more for being 'unheard of'. Combine this with an Italian manager and it goes without saying where we should be fishing; in the pond where we're the biggest pole, not in the pond where every great fisherman we know is fishing.

Lewandowski is out for Bayern in the CL tie tonight - worrying, yes, but not the end of the world, and you'd still consider Bayern to be at least equal to Madrid. If Messi or Neymar is out, worrying yes, but you still expect Barcelona to win. If Dybala is out, you still expect Juve to win. But when Costa is out? (even with his form this year.) Shambles. The walls would crumble down around us, and whoever we're against would instantly be favourites, in a CL tie at least. Why oh why are we the ONLY top club winning league titles, that try and get by with only ONE top striker? Juve, Man City, United, Barcelona, Madrid, PSG, even Benfica, Monaco, Atletico Madrid...They all have options when their main striker is out for whatever reason. Yet we wonder why our striker ends up mentally exhausted? We wonder why our striker stops fighting? Rocket science... We're never in that boat which has OPTIONS. For years now, we never have a rotation strategy for our striker(s). It sickens me. The exact same goes for Hazard too, and Luiz, and Kante. 1 single main player being out is terrible for us, but not nearly as terrible for any other team, even Arsenal & Liverpool. I'm all for romance and not just buying big names to excite fans, but you need quality on the bench, big name or not. Only twice under Abramovich have we had a better scenario (so is it HIS order?); Anelka + Drogba; Eto'o + Ba. That's it. The only time we've had strikers as good as eachother; the only time we wouldn't pull our hair out after finding out our striker's ruled out the day or night before a game. Costa isn't quite as troublesome as the way we're still being managed. This is why I see the likes of Silva & Mbappe as BENCH players, not damn automatic starters like most would have them. It absolutely ruins their mentality. No player can resist decreasing in quality if their place in the lineup is a given.

Andy Carroll scored vs. top teams more often than Drogba did in 2010/2011, but we wouldn't have brought him in if Drogba were to leave, no way. Perfect example, IMO, seeing as Lukaku and Carroll share 80% of the same qualities, and wouldn't even be a sidestep from Costa, but an obvious downgrade. Costa in a purple-patch is in another league compared to Lukaku in a purple-patch. Goals mean so much less than people make them out to be. Otherwise Nistelrooy, Inzaghi & Berbatov would be hailed the 3 greatest strikers of our time. All of them were moved on despite still scoring plenty, for good reason. There's only so long you can put up with the consistent frustration a player like Lukaku brings. His style is anti-football. He scores goals, but that's it. No style. A simple-minded player. A could-have-been player. Effective? Sure. But so is Defoe, and Modeste is banging them in in Germany too. I doubt either are desired by any of us though. Why should Lukaku be desired? It's like being a Formula 1 driver who can drive really fast but has no idea how to turn corners. The top brands will rarely ever sign a one-dimensional sportsman. They'd have to be exceedingly good at that 1 thing they do - better than anyone else around does it - to be considered. Lukaku is not the best goalscorer around. He has far many more flaws too compared to his peers who score the same amount as him.

I think we've tipped the scales of what a balanced thread should be.

Do any of those people who said Hazard should be sold post today? I'm sure we'd remember their names, unless they had 13 posts each.