TorontoChelsea

One of our best games of the year easily. Score is deceptive. We dominated them.

Hell, if I were 25, super rich and famous, I wouldn't have a GF either. He can get women as often as Ashley Young dives.

It's ridiculous. Once again, supporters expect players to be like them. I'd expect Mata to say all the right things to make Manchester United fans happy now. It's just business. Yes, it's sad to see Mata go to ManU and on a sour note, but people need to be reasonable.

Mata wasn't getting played and was never getting to get regular time under Mourinho so he wanted to go elsewhere. He didn't go to United to spite Chelsea supporters. How can you be upset at Mata for going to United but not at Chelsea for selling him to United? Mata would have gone to any top club where he would have played. Chelsea sold him to United to maximize profit. Chelsea, not Mata, are the ones who decided that Mata should go to United. Anyway, I always laugh at the idea of loyalty in football. It's supporters putting their own views on players who don't have them. If Chelsea suddenly became a mid-table team (not really possible but this is a hypothetical) how loyal do you think our players would be? If we went bankrupt and couldn't afford to pay our players their salaries, how loyal would they be? Players want to go where they can play, where they can win trophies, and where they can make the most money. They are the same as you and I. If I got an offer to go to a rival company where I got a promotion and double my pay, you could bet damn well, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

Different sort of thing entirely as you say. Everyone wanted Hazard. He was an accomplished young player who had dominated a good league- a player destined for greatness. The sort of talent that is rare in football. Salah is a promising young player but not on a special level Hazard was (very few are). Why can't let people let players be themselves instead of trying to compare them . Give Salah some space and let's see what kind of player he can become with Chelsea.

It's an odd goodbye because he's been a shell of himself for longer than he was actually himself.He really only had 3 fantastic years with Chelsea and 5 years of frustration, injury, and mediocrity. For those three years, he was some player though!

Anyway, thoughts on signing overall. I think it's decent signing. Low risk, for Chelsea low-money, seems to be a Mourinho sort of player, and he's likely to be OK with not being a core player. As for thoughts on him as a player. Who knows? It's not like many of us watch the Swiss league. We'll have to wait and see. I'm sure he's talented or we wouldn't have signed him. But seriously, many people position themselves on experts on every league. How much time do you have? Just watching the Premier League alone would be 16 hours a week., Domestic cups, Champions League, top matches from other leagues...it takes up a hell of a lot of time just to get a basic level of football watching. (Obviously, there are some people who do watch the Swiss league genuinely but I always am skeptical when people have claimed to have watched players a lot in small leagues.)

Or 12 points behind.

But easier to concentrate on your football. No distractions at all!

But all of those were still good for 4 or 5 years minimum after Chech's age. That's the point. You can't build football teams for 7 years down the road anymore. Things change too drastically. Look at Mata leaving. To make a move because we will be better off in 6 years is crazy. (That's not to say we should bring back to Courtois, just that this shouldn't be the reason.)

Hahaha. This is brilliant. You talk about anti-Zionism being different than anti-Semitism and then come in with one of the most straightforward anti-Semitic tropes of all time. The Rothschild controlling world banking systems and all that stuff is absolute nonsense. You really can't get more paranoid old fashioned anti-Semitism than that. Anyway, this post has no business being on this page and should be deleted (More fit for Der sturmer).

It's not just Van Der Sar who lasted a long time. Pretty much all keepers do. Seaman played at Arsenal until he was 40. Buffon is 36 and still an elite keeper. Schmeichel was still in the Premier League at 40. Oliver Khan played with Bayern until he was 73.Etc...There are very good reasons to choose Courtois to move on with, but Cech about to fall apart is not one of them.

Egypt is not at war with Israel and has had a peace deal since 1977 which is about 15 years before Salah was even born. And yes, on the football pitch, I'd expect everyone to shake hands with everyone. One of the benefits of sport is that it brings people together. Refusing to shake someone's hand because you don't like the country his club is based in does against the values that sport should stand for, And It is not my view on Arab views on homosexuality. It's the unfortunate reality. http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/ Additionally, of all the countries that backed the UN gay-rights treaty, none are Arab. In fact, most of those countries banned together to fight the declaration and staged a walk out in protest .People in almost all Middle Eastern countries are jailed for being gay. Lebanon is one of the best countries for gays and is still terrible. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25099130

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-2246076/Chelsea-star-Eden-Hazard-caught-anti-Israel-riddle--Charles-Sale.html http://espnfc.com/print?id=1250810&type=story It's all over the place not just in Israeli press. And yes, footballers have political beliefs but it's also an owner's right not to have a player on the squad whose beliefs he doesn't like. Roman could insist that Chelsea be made up entirely of people born in January 1987 and that's his right. Salah would be a hero in Egypt and the Arab world for having all sorts of views that we in the West would find troubling to sickening. If he came out with "Homosexuals should be banned", or "I don't like Jews" both views shared by over 95% of Egyptians and most of the Arab world. (and no, not Israelis, the poll question says Jews.). Should we say "well, that's his culture. Who are we to say anything?" What if some Fascist player refuses to shake hands with a Muslim because in his words "they're all raghead terrorists"? He'd be a hero to people who thought like him and after all it's just his culture. Cultural relativism is a slippery slope. Players shouldn't be political unless it's non-controversial (give food aid to starving countries, etc...). Just shut up and play football.

Everton? lol Josh had an OK year in the Championship. He's not going to get playing time for a team fighting to play in Europe? He deserved another loan back to the Championship or maybe a low Premier League side not to a top Premier League side.

For budget flights. You think a team investing 50M pounds or so would fly someone in on Ryanair to save a few hundreds pounds?

Of course it's because of Mourinho that Mata left. I had a few concerns with Chelsea re-hiring Mourinho and the first was that many of our players didn't fit Mourinho's system and Jose wasn't a very flexible manager. He has his system and that's what he always plays. He emphasizes defensive responsibility, pressure, and counter-attack and only players who fit into that system will have success and players who don't will be ousted. Mata was always a poor fit and it's not really a surprise that he's on the way out. We hired Mourinho and we are sticking with him so this is the result. There's no surprise here and long-term it makes no sense to have an elite player wasting away on your bench. His value to other teams is way greater than it is to us so we might as well maximize that to get players that fit.

Not positive or negative. It's just the reality of things at a big spending club. If it were up to me teams like Chelsea, City, Madrid, etc...wouldn't be able to do things the way they do them. It's ridiculous. But that's the way it is.

Sort of like the Moses transfer. Promising young player and we'll give him a go and if he can't make it, we'll loan him out and buy a 30M pound player instead.

I think it suits our team better. The only problem is the lack of wingers. We have players who can cover at attacking midfield, but I think we'd need to bring someone else in (maybe Moses back?) to regularly play the 4-3-3.

We don't have a position RW. In a 4-2-3-1 there is an attacking midfielder on the right (and in our system, barely).And we really only play counter-attack now anyway so he can fit in there. I'm not saying he's ideal, but he's not nearly as bad as people make him out to be.

He's not a great fit for the centre either. You really want Ramires being the guy who controls the attack and temp of the game? He's not ideal on the wing, but we don't really play with wingers and while Ramires as an attacking midfielder is problematic, it's never been nearly as bad as people pretend. He opens up space for our other attackers and is one of our best finishers from up close. Anyway, pretty much every manager has put him there at one point.

It's not 4 players for 3 positions. Ramires will play some attacking midfield for sure now that Matic is here. It would have happened anyway. Also, Mourinho often makes a second striker play out wide when we are behind which means that Eto'o, Ba, and Torres take some of the time from attacking midfielders as well.

Extremely lucky to be leading never mind up 2-0 but United have no real strikers so it's not a huge surprise, their finishing has been awful.

Or how about you just don't start threads for subjects we have already have threads for..