TorontoChelsea

No, he isn't. The point Mikel is clearly making is the it's not the defensive midfielder's position to go forward. If the DM goes forward, it leaves a spot uncovered. He's explaining why defensive midfielders don't join the play, not making a specific criticism of Lampard. It's an absurd reading of a straightforward comment. (Also, It's absolutely not the job of the deep-lying midfielder to cover for runs made by the defensive midfielder because the defensive midfielder should not be making runs. Busquets might be the best defensive midfielder in the world right now and he has scored 3 goals in his career. Makalele is the greatest defensive midfielder Chelsea ever had and he scored 2 goals in 144 games in the league with us.)

I like Hazard in the middle but I don't understand the "Mata is better when he's not on the wings" thing. He has played almost exclusively as a winger in his career and was better there under AVB than he was in the 4-2-3-1 under RDM last season. I agree that the side becomes absurdly imbalanced when we play with Bertrand or Ramires because neither belong in that position. I think with Moses or Marin on the wing it changes. I think our biggest issue so far is our poor shape. Mata and Hazard are basically duplicating each other. So, against Reading when Ramires started we literally had nobody who was actually playing on the left and a central midfielder on the right and when Bertrand plays we have a LB on the left and nobody on the right. It really imbalances the team and opens up massive avenues on the wings to counter-attack and just creates imbalance all over the field. Chelsea right now are playing with two #10s which you just can't do long-term.

Then there's no width. Ramires and Lampard are not wingers so Mata and Hazard would have to go out wide which is the biggest problem with moving to a different system. I want a system where Hazard and Mata are the ones running the attack, not just wingers.

I played high school sports and it's very different. High school sports don't generally make any money. They don't generally charge admission, build their own stadiums etc...so you are playing for free because there is no money involved. If my high school baseball or basketball teams was making $2 million dollars a year, you can bet your life we'd be wanting (and deserving) some of that money.

Except how many of them make the pros? There are something like 65, 000+ players in division 1 football. There are about 1,700 players in the NFL. This means that the vast vast majority of these players never make money yet the college football industry is worth 2 billion dollars a year. How would you feel if your boss came to you and said "hey, do your work for free while I make billions and if you're in the top 2% of workers, you'll make a lot of money" would you take it?. (and even in the NFL, it's unfair, the average players makes a million dollars in their career and shortens their life expectancy by about 25 years. What a wonderful opportunity to make it!) The system is completely skewed.

When was the last player who we let go and went on to become a star somewhere else? Paizon will get his chance to show if he has enough quality to play for Chelsea and if he is good enough, he'll play, and if he's not, he won't. There is some negativity, but I also think a lot of it is a response to the ridiculous levels of optimism about our young players. You take every single young player we have who is being loaned out, with our youth team, etc...and the chances are that maybe zero to one of them becomes good enough to be a Chelsea regular. That's not negativity, that's just the way football works. (As we well know, we have developed about one great player and only a handful of squad players over the past decade.) It's annoying because people are always trying to replace proven internationals with our youth team players and it doesn't work like that. It's fun to speculate on players' futures but until someone has prolonged success at a high level, it's really not worth paying too much attention to them.

Canada won on a late goal which was nice. We'd be much better if so many of our players didn't opt to play for other countries. This happened with Owen Heargraves (Following Greg Rusedski and Lennox Lewis who also become British for convenience. It's odd how the term British is really mostly used for people like this. Most other people are English, Scottish, Welsh, etc.. ) The one I don't get is the case of someone like Jonathan de Guzman. If you were the type of talent Heargraves was, you might want the chance at real glory, With Canada you would never win the World Cup. But a player like de Guzman? He's made himself available for the Dutch national team. On Canada, he'd be a regular, for Holland, maybe he'll get a handful of caps in his career. He's simply not good enough to be a big part of the Dutch squad. Not only that, his brother plays for Canada...anyway, I don't get it.

Because college sports are immoral. It's a system where the athletes are not allowed to be paid and make tens of millions for other people.

I was going to link to this myself. Very good analysis. It won't matter. People have decided the double pivot is at fault for everything.

Still a shock. It was obviously huge news here in Canada where hockey is a national obsession. Players like Demitra, Rachunek, and Salei had excellent careers in the NHL and were well known. Horrifically tragic.

Fantastic response SeB.

No, I'm trying to say that being selfish is normal and that Sturridge's selfishness isn't really remarkable. I'm also saying that people obsessed with that aspect of Sturridge miss what an excellent talent he actually is.

Very interesting stuff. Sturridge was actually the best at providing through-balls, passed second most frequently, and was the second most accurate passer. Doesn't matter because most people have already made up their mind with the "Sturridge is too selfish" crap.

Agreed. There's a lot of talk about numbers, I don't know why anyone cares. Does anyone think "Oh, Zola, he was no good, he wore #25"?

None of them had the good sense of hiring Roman as owner. Rather short-sited of them.

They can tuck into the middle, but they won't be the creators as long as they are on the wings. The field general needs to be in a more naturally central position. Chelsea are sort of stuck between two places right now. They have 3 players they want to start who can all play the #10 and plenty of wingers but are woefully thin in central midfield. I am assuming they will stay with the 4-2-3-1 and try to work Oscar into at least part-time duty the double pivot, but that's a big risk to take.

How? Roma was the 7th best team in Italy last season, Inter the 6th best and they are quality teams. There is simply no way Russia ever comes close to that. The Russian league is right now ranked as the 9th best league in Europe by UEFA. Maybe it will climb its way past Netherlands and Ukraine but I can't see it going above that. Beyond the fact that only one team is spending money anyway (and the other teams are poor quality), even if other teams start spending money, players won't want to go to Russia for many reasons.The quality of the league is poor, the weather is awful, the language is different (not a romance language and not English), and the quality of living is low. This is all based on Zenit spending big on two transfers?

There are a couple of other problems with the 4-3-3. The main one is that it moves Hazard and Mata to wingers from a more central position. Hazard is most effective up the middle behind the striker. Ideally, you'd want Hazard and Mata being the creators. Moving them to the wing puts more emphasis on them crossing the ball and running up and down the wings. Chelsea actually spent about 80M pounds in the last two years on players that should be playing behind the striker. It just doesn't make sense to switch to a system that would remove that position entirely.

The Russian League is not as good as the French league and is miles behind the Italian league and not likely to ever catch up to them.

Nobody should be screaming for Robbie's head (and I don't think he has much say in transfers anyway) but I just don't get this move. We have excellent depth in all attacking midfield positions-Hazard, Mata, Moses, Ramires, Lampard, Oscar, Marin, Malouda, Sturridge and even Piazon can play there. We have two pure defensive midfielders in Mikel and Romeu but for the deep-lying midfielder we have Lampard and nobody else. Even Lampard is not a natural at this position. Oscar might be able to play there but he's a natural#10 and he's new to the Premiership. The imbalance in the squad is very strange. Then you think, well maybe Chelsea are going to move to a 4-3-3 but that doesn't make sense either because it would turn Hazard and Mata from playing behind the striker into pure wingers which means they'd run the show less which is not what you want. It will be interesting to see what happens next but I find this move confusing. (And I don't want to see youngsters being given more than peripheral jobs until they earn more playing time.) Also, agree with you about how ridiculous it is that people only seem to remember the last game Meireles played. It reminds me of my 3 YO niece, When I was at the Zoo with her, I asked her "what's your favourite animal?".and she always picked the last one she saw.

Seriously? Brana was one of the best RB in the Premiership for the past few years. Hutchinson has played a total of 8 league games in his career, only 5 games at the Premiership level. Hutchinson has some upside but as of now, he's nowhere near Ivanovic.

Yes, Ya Ya Toure definitely has the ability to create. For example, last season, he created a chance once every 49 minutes. He had 6 assists in the league. Ramires, on the other hand, had had 2 assists in about 60 league games over 2 years and created a chance once every 124 minutes last season. Ya Ya Toure is not a prototypical creative deep-lying midfielder (like Iniesta or Xabi Alonso) -he's really a box to box midfielder, but he's such a well-rounded and fantastic player that he'll fit into any system and he is definitely creative enough to play in that role. Ya Ya Toure is an excellent passer. Ramires is not.

What it comes down to is that Porto viewed Hulk as a super-star and (rightly) no major clubs did. Zenit was willing to overpay so Porto took the money.

The 4-2-3-1 requires a creative player as the deep-lying midfielder. If you play someone like Ramires, there is no proper bridge between your defenders and your attackers. Being fast does not make up for not being able to create. Ramires created an awful 1 chance every 124 minutes last season despite playing mostly an attacking role. Ramires is simply not a deep lying midfielder and playing him there would be a silly mistake. As for Romeu playing when Mikel needs to be rested, that was likely to happen anyway. Essien could have played as a defensive midfielder but Meireles isn't one and his departure doesn't effect Romeu in any way.

Ramires is not the right player for the double pivot role. You need to be a creative passer to play there and that's just not Ramires. Also, don't see how this would get Romeu more time because he's a straight defensive midfielder which is Mikel's spot and he's still around. I have no idea what RDM is going to do though because no options really make sense.