TorontoChelsea

Exactly. The truth in football is that you take your wins any way you can get them. You aren't going to win pretty all that often and you don't need to. You just need the 3 points.

We simply have the best scoring defenders in the league. Ivanovic has a great touch, Terry is a beast in the air and Cahill and Luiz both know how to get forward. It's just a nice aspect of the game to have.

I pretty much agree. Two other things I'll add is that 1) the team that Chelsea seem to want to be build, short-passing, skill based, doesn't really fit in with Hulk. He does have skills, but he loves to shoot and takes lots of shots from distance. He was a perfect fit for AVB's 4-3-3, but not really for this team. 2) There comes a point when adding new players subtracts from your current players. You are really only going to have 2-3 players be big scorers for you in any year. You know who the fourth leading scorers were for Man City and Real Madrid last season? Adam Johnson and Jose Maria Callehon. Even when Chelsea scored an incredible 103 goals a few years back, we only had 4 players with more than 5 goals. It's important to have players that aren't flashy, that just do their job and allow the creative players to create and the scorers to score.

Which is why Ramires fits well on the right. He's excellent cover when Ivanovic makes his runs. He's been one of our best players for the past couple of years, so don't know why people are getting on Brana.

It's insane. The most annoying thing about football these days is the overreaction to everything. Every play, every game, and so on. People were saying Hazard was crap because he played poorly in the Community Shield. Now he's fantastic because he had a good game against Wigan. Personally, I think he's going to be a tremendous player, but I want to wait 5-10 games that matter to get a better sense. This judging players on individual games, individual touches even is absurd.

He still has to make some runs, he just has to time them well and be smart about when he makes them. I think he only made a few runs against Reading and he certainly wasn't shirking his defensive responsibilities. I think calling the system 4-2-3-1 confuses some people (not saying you, just in general). The deep-lying midfielder is not a defensive position. They do have to provide cover but so does everyone except possibly the striker. It's a creative position and Lampard has creativity in spades. The position also does not requires incredible speed. Players like Alonso and Pirlo are fantastic deep-lying midfielders and neither has particularly blazing pace. Long-term, we will need to replace Lampard as a starter, but I see no reason to believe he can't continue to be a very effective player for us this season.

I think inserting Bertrand into the lineup shows how much RDM craves defensive balance in the lineup. He's obviously prefer to use Ramires, but he went with a defensive-minded player rather than any number of attacking players he could have gone with in his stead. I don't think we'll see much of a Mata-Oscar-Hazard front three this season because of defensive concerns.

Actually, if you look at Lampard's average position for the game, it's right where it should be. He was ahead of Mikel and behind the front 3 midfielders. Lampard is not a defensive midfield and he's not supposed to be in this formation. He is going to make some runs and Chelsea will be better off for it.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Non-fiction that reads like fiction. Excellent stuff...

I guess I have some massive psychic powers! Probably no NHL this year, at least for a couple of months so you'll have even more time to follow Chelsea.

Lampard was one of the better players in the Premier League last season and was a key to us winning anything. He has been the best player to ever play for Chelsea. The complete lack of respect for Lampard on here is disturbing. Respect, not based on what he has done for us a decade, but respect based on what he still does for us. Some people want the team to be made up entirely of 19 year olds or something. No, Lampard is not going to do some fancy back-heel pass or make a blazing run, but individual plays like that are always overrated. Lampard is going to distribute the ball well, will be our best penalty taker, be a leader, and try his hardest. How can you say he's only after personal glory? He's taking the penalty because he's our best penalty taker. He's one of the best ever in that regard. This is about Chelsea trying to win, not about us trying to build Torres' confidence.

Welcome...(I assume you're from Calgary)

It's as if people expect us to play for 90 minutes like we played for the first 6. As if we need to win every match 7-0 for people to be satisfied. A 2-0 away win against anybody in the Premier League is a good result.

He was fine. He was invisible for much of the game, but had a couple of fantastic moments.

Wow..We're up 2-0 after the first half and people on here are pretending like we need to panic. We played poorly for the last 20 minutes, but that happens. Teams don't dominate for 90 minutes very often. It's going to take a while for our players to get to know each other better, but it's a good start.

Well, that's a good start!

Way too defensive. Bertrand is a LB who can be deployed as a winger if we want to play defensively. We have a lot of players that can play on the left who can attack. Anyway, I think the lineup is 95% going to be Cech, Ivanovic, Luiz, Terry, Cole, Mikel, Lampard, Mata, Hazard, Ramires, Torres unless someone is hurt or exhausted. Only possible change I can see is Cahill in for Luiz but don't think that will happen this week. I expect Oscar and Sturridge to both make appearances off the bench as well.

You're right that Mata doesn't dictate the pace of the game, but almost no players in the Premier league can do that. There is too much talent and depth in the league to allow people to boss the game around. Oscar will not have the same time that he has had in Brazil to look for openings. I'd hate to see Oscar starting without some time to get familiar with the team. Ramires will likely start and no way in hell Bertrand starts unless Cole is hurt. Bertrand looked pretty decent in a handful of games last season, but Cole is one of the best LBs in the world. I think Bertrand will make a good LB some day, but I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't Chelsea caliber either. I know everyone loves the new and potential, but as we found out last year, often the older and the established are better. As for Oscar getting stick? I don't think it will happen. It will be Lampard and Mikel who will get the blame for anything that goes wrong.

You can theoretically improve peoples' lives best with dictatorship. The dictator has no red tape, no political interference. Saddam Hussein gave Iraq one of the best health care and education systems in the Middle East. But well, you know, he was a violent dictator who massacred his own people. The problem is that it's all theoretical. In theory, an enlightened dictator is the single best political system. In practice, dictatorship like Communism, doesn't work. In fact, they end up basically being the same thing with one dictator ,or at best, one party, dictating everything with no tolerance of dissent. Yes, China and The USSR had improvements under communism, but the prices they paid were enormous. 10s of millions of people dying from Famine in the USSR (which nobody knew about for 60 years because of Communist control over media), 10s of millions of dead in "the Great Leap Forward" under Mao. In fact, China's economy has taken off, because of their opening up to capitalist reforms. The first reforms towards Capitalism happened in 1978. Since then, absolute poverty has shrunk from 41% to 5%, China's growth has been 9.5% per year. What has made China much better is actually the liberalization of their economy. I will agree with you that I vastly prefer left-leaning governments because I am a liberal, but there is a massive difference between Social democracy (which always are capitalist societies with a strong sense of communal responsibility/equality) and Communism. Communism simply doesn't work. It never has and it never will.

Which makes signing him strange. Hulk is best as a 4-3-3 winger but we are going to play a 4-2-3-1 system so Hulk would be playing on the right of the 3 as an attacking midfielder.

Mata drifted back a fair bit last season and that was one of the problems. He had to move everywhere. On the left, right, attacking, coming back. He was covering too much ground. You really don't want your attacking midfielders receiving the ball too deep too often and while players like Silva and Ozil can drop back, they also get service from deeper players like Alonso and Ya Ya Toure. It's hard to know what Oscar will be like because most of us have only watched him with Brazil. We'll see. His best role will likely be playing in the 3 behind the striker though.

Of course he's going to start unless he's hurt or exhausted.

We are vastly better off than out ancestors in almost every way. We live longer, we fight fewer wars, we have more control over our lives, we are vastly more educated, etc... The cost has mostly been environmental. While people are unlikely to rise to the point where they control capital, A) some people do. Many billionaires are completely self made and many politicians come from middle and lower classes. One of the things about most democracies and in capitalistic societies is that you don't have to rise to that level to have a voice. Governments get voted out. Companies that aren't popular enough go out of business. We are not serfs or anything close to that. The last Prime Ministers of Australia-Gillard's parents were nurses. Rudd grew up in poverty. John Howard's parents ran petrol stations, Paul Keating was working class, etc..Christine Legarde's father was a professor, her mother a teacher. The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim comes from a similar background. Wealth bestows great privilege on people, but it is no longer impossible to overcome (In most modern societies .)

It's a very tough situation because we have two strikers both of whom could be very good or very bad. If Torres and Sturridge are both good, you don't need anyone more than a body who can play some minutes in case of injury. If they are poor, then you need someone who can step up and play regularly. I thought that maybe we should have taken back Odemwingie from WBA. He can actually score, but he's 31 so not really part of their future and if he didn't play for us much, we wouldn't be stifling any development, but if we needed him he could start... and it would also open up more time for Lukaku!

I wouldn't mind if we got him, I just don't see the upside. I'd rather Sturridge be given a shot there as our #2 striker. For me, we can either go for a long-term #1 striker like Cavani or we should go for a #3 striker to provide nothing more than injury cover but we don't want to develop. Berbatov is not really good enough to be a #1 if Torres flops again but is good enough to take playing time away from Sturridge. I'm not worried about Lukaku's development at all. If he plays well elsewhere, he will get a chance at Chelsea. Quite frankly, if he ever makes it Chelsea, I don't think it will be for at least a couple of years,. He has a lot of work to do. Much more concerned with Sturridge. Would love to see him start about 20-25 games this season, come in and sub in many others to give a real idea of what he can do as our striker. Sturridge's scoring rate as a forward (at Bolton and under AVB) in the last two seasons has been fantastic: 17 goals in 33 games.