TorontoChelsea

No. He was never really a Chelsea player. He started 2 games outside the League Cup for Chelsea. He played 9 games in total. Do you know how many players have come and gone over the years? Our history is filled with players who came and went. I love Chelsea and support their players, but not every single player who plays a game for us deserves our lifetime admiration. He contributed nothing to Chelsea on the pitch. It's like being attached to Stoch, Ben Sahar, Quaresma, Borini, Maniche, Jarosik, or any number of countless players that come through Stamford Bridge that did nothing . I wish them luck, but I don't particularly care. They never did anything for the club to warrant any positive feelings or loyalty. Even someone like Meireles who had a very brief and mediocre time at Chelsea will always get my respect because he was a regular starter at Chelsea and played a key role in our Champions League win. You see players like Kalou, Mikel, and Malouda who led Chelsea to trophies, who played an important role on our team for years get nothing but opprobrium.

Good luck to him but I don't particularly care. He was never really a Chelsea player and his total contributions on the pitch, despite 250 pages+ of discussion, were absolutely nil. Lots of players come and go. Some people get way too attached to theoretical potential rather than appreciating what players actually do for us.

United relied a lot on Van Persie and Rooney to create something magical. They are two fantastic players and without them the team is mediocre. Obviously, you can't take any team lightly, but this is the weakest United side in a long time.

He doesn't perform to the maximum of his ability and makes stupid mistakes. I don't think it's even arguable. He's been making the same things for 3 years under 4 different managers and they are not getting fixed. It's not down to a lack of talent which is forgivable, it's down to a lack of concentration or effort or something else or understanding what he should be doing. My biggest fault with him is not his mistakes, every defender makes mistakes, it's his lofting the ball upfield 10 times a game. It's his wandering into positions that are ridiculous for a defender to be in. It's his shooting way too much. It's his trying to dribble past players as a defender. It's basic stuff that he should be fixing

A bunch of thoughts on this. 1) Overall-good signing. About the right price. Addresses a real need, gives balance to the team. 2) 21M is not a an incredible bargain, it is about the right price. He's 25, a central midfielder (who are cheaper), and coming from a significantly worse league with one excellent season under his belt. At the same time, it's not too expensive for someone who could be a real difference maker. 3) I worry that Ramires/Matic is not a particularly balanced central midfield. Excellent defensively but neither player is a distributor or the type of player who is going to dictate tempo. 4) I think Ramires is going to play a lot more attacking than people think. It's not just going to be Ramires/Matic (although that will happen a lot) I also think we might play more 4-3-3 now which I think will suit our team better. Matic, Ramires, and Oscar with Hazard and Willian/Schurrle/Mata seems more balanced than going 4-2-3-1 now. 5) Don't really care that we sold him and bought him back although it makes the Luiz transfer awful in retrospect.

Nobody hates Luiz (I hope). He's a Chelsea a player and as such, we support him. However, he is an incredibly frustrating player for a lot of us because of his inability to simplify his game and his tendency to try to do way too much. The difference between the way people treat Cahill and Luiz is analogous to the way a teacher would treat two different students. Cahill is the student who isn't particularly bright but tries hard and gets OK grades. He doesn't have the most ability but he's doing his best. Luiz is the student who has all the ability in the world but doesn't do his homework, skips class for a couple of weeks in a row. and sometimes put together an amazing paper and sometimes puts zero effort into it. It's not always just about results.It's also about maximizing ability.

I think this is one of the general problems with a lot of Chelsea players and Ramires exemplifies it. What kind of player do you want playing next to Ramires? He's very good defensively but he's not a defensive midfielder. He needs freedom to be able to go forward but he's limited in attack. I haven't seen much of Matic, but to me, I don't think he's the ideal player to play next to Ramires. There aren't a lot of advanced stats available for public view for Matic except from the Champion's League and Europa League over the last few seasons and in those 25 games or so he's been poor. There are a couple of things that concern me 1) his low passing percentage and that's a low passing percentage and this is not a player who is crossing the ball a lot or feeding the ball into dangerous areas which result in lower passing rates. He's a central midfielder and not one getting tons of assists. His passing percentage should be around 90% In last year's CL, he had a 76% passing rate. This year, it's 83.2%. In the Europa league it was 80.1%. In the CL the year before around 74%. A Ramires/Matic duo is not likely to move the ball particularly well. 2) He's gotten worse. Last year, he was a 3-time player of the month. This year, he hasn't won it once and by all accounts, he has regressed. That being said, he will definitely be an improvement on what we currently have and we badly need a central midfielder right now.

Do we really need another thread about the pivot?

What? People never blame our attacking midfield for anything.We could draw 0-0 and people would still vote for them as our players of the game. The pivot, on the other hand, gets blamed for everything.

Not really. They have first-option clause if Barcelona look to sell Fabergas which is a massive difference. (And for a team like Barcelona, who aren't a selling club with Fabergas being from there, it's a clause that will only be used if things go really bad.) If we tried to insert a buyback clause or a first-refusal clause to a sale in this situation, it would greatly reduce what we could get for De Bruyne.Ffans have a tendency to have a singular view of sales and loans, but there needs to be a benefit for both clubs or nothing happens. Buy-back clauses are extremely rare for a reason. It's pretty difficult to envision any future where De Bruyne plays a big part for Chelsea in the next few years. We have a whole bunch of attacking midfielders who are all young, ahead of him on the depth chart and De Bruyne is never going to be a Mourinho sort of player. Just sell him for maximum profit and move on.

He's not going to United. They have plenty of attacking midfielders as is and we wouldn't want to sell to them. People can just make up any rumour and some people will take it seriously.

One of the all-time greats,

Hated this lineup from the start. I'm still confident we'll win, but 1) You need to rotate players and if you can't rotate players against Derby in the early rounds of the FA Cup, you also can't complain about them being tired later on 2) I am not someone who believes that you can bring youngsters directly into the squad very often, but you have to get them some game time and playing one or two players in a game like this wouldn't kill the game. 3) You don't have to play defensive counter-attack football in every game. We do have players that can break down other teams. (Mata or Hazard especially) We are playing a squad that is ideally built to defend and counter-attack against a team that is not looking to have much possession. Doesn't make much sense.

You're wrong. You can judge a player based on the Championship, just like you can judge people based on their play in the Dutch league or the MLS. People have to stop bringing up Barkley as a comparison because it's awful. He played 17 games in the Championship and was fine when he played. He scored 4 goals in 13 games with Sheffield where he was very good. The reason he didn't play much at Leeds is because, according to their manager, "He’s best playing behind a frontman, but that was difficult for me at Leeds as I had Ross McCormack and that was his best position too. McCormack was the No 1 man at Leeds so it was hard to leave him out for a teenager on loan, but when I played one of them wide it didn’t suit either of their strengths." Barkely also played 9 games with Everton last year and 9 the year before so they knew what they had. Chalobah hasn't played a single game above the Championship and isn't not playing because Forest is stacked, he's not playing because he's been poor. And Zaha not playing is more an indictment of the talent difference between the Championship and Premier League than anything else. It's a massive jump that few players are able to make. Even the best players in the Championship have difficulty impacting the Premier League. Chalobah needs a good loan where he can get playing time and work on his game. He's gone backwards since last season.

Well, stars get away with more in every sport. You can fine them, suspend them, both, I don't care but it's a problem that is actually very easy to stop if people really wanted to.

I really think there should be retroactive punishment for divers who aren't caught. A yellow in the game is fine, but lots of times, the referee doesn't see it. It's an awful part of football and I think more needs to be done to get rid of it. If the punishments were severe enough, you'd start to see it stop completely.

I love Mata and I understand his frustration and it doesn't bother me, but as I and others have been saying for a long time, he just doesn't fit the system Mourinho wants to play. It would be better for him and for Chelsea if we could sell him. He will be great for the team he goes to because he is a great player, but he doesn't fit this Chelsea team.

Let me explain what free speech actually means. Free speech means that you have the right to say whatever you want up until the point society decides. In the US this is very liberal, in France, it's more restrictive. Let's take the US then. You can say "I hate gays", "I hate blacks", "Asians are greedy" whatever you want and you can't be prosecuted. It's not illegal. However, your company can and probably will fire you. Freedom of speech protects you from legal challenges. It does not protect you from ramifications from your workplace. Anelka did something extremely offensive. The Premier League or UEFA could, if they wanted, ban him for life and it would have nothing to do with freedom of speech. You get no protection that way and there re tons of cases every year like this. (Recently, some woman on twitter posed something like "Going to Africa, I hope I don't get AIDS, oh wait, I'm white." She was fired and she deserved to be but she won't be prosecuted.

What??? He deserves no support at all. He made what everyone in France knows is an incredibly offensive gesture in support of an extreme bigot who he considers his friend. I don't care if other people have done it. It's offensive and there's no place for it anywhere near football. This is not the media making something up, it's something very real that the media in England is being introduced to for the first time as it was a French phenomenon until now. Anelka deserves and will get a long ban. I have no sympathy for fascists and bigots nor people who try to justify and minimize their bigotry with pathetic backwards rationalizations. He's an adult who did something he knew was offensive in support of a disgusting human being. He deserves support? For what? I'm finding the apologists for this baffling. And mostly idiotic.by people who don't have the faintest clue of what freedom of speech actually is (like the Duck Dynasty stuff) or how offensive gestures and language evolve. It's like calling someone a "retarded fag" and then saying well, "technically it means delayed bunch of sticks so nobody can be offended." Defending this level of obvious bigotry is bigotry.

So lucky there. Should have been a penalty

Lampard has a thigh strain. Too bad, he's been good.

That's still 220M pounds which is more than all but a few teams in the world even without Torres.

One on one matchups are overblown in football which is a team game. If Suarez is allowed to get 1 on 1 with Cahill in front of goal, other people, probably several, have messed up to give him that chance.

Wow, you're attributing a lot of quality play to Luiz that there is simply no evidence for which is why you think the positives are a lot higher than they actually are. Our movement in the attacking midfield is literally not one iota better with Luiz. The problem with the attacking midfield's spacing is that they don't space well not that they don't expect long passes.And easily find them with a long pass? Seriously? Luiz will hit one or two of those long passes a game and miss about 5. You act as if he's picking out attacking players with ease as opposed to just kicking the ball up the pitch and hoping an attacker gets on to it which is usually what he does. And you can't ignore the negatives of such play. Turning the ball over is a negative. Kick the ball up the pitch leads to lack of organization and looseness of attack. And the point is that Luiz's actions don't actually lead to goals. For example, WAGNH looked at hockey assists (second assists) for the first half of the season last year. Luiz had 0 second assists. (Ryan Bertrand had 2) That is, for all the hitting the ball up the pitch, it basically never leads directly to goals.

I don't think it's underrated at all. Everyone knows about this aspect of Luiz's game. It's the best of him. He can read a play beautifully Intercepting a pass and turning it the other way. There are just a lot of negatives with the rest Luiz's game when he's off like he has been much of this year (poor in the air, too many silly mistakes, poor positioning, inefficient passing, inefficient shooting).