TorontoChelsea

Cahill is fine. He's perfect as a #3/4 defender who you can put in and expect mostly quality performances and his willingness to put his body on the line is exemplary. He's never going to be Kompany or anything, but I think you can win with less than world-class CBs if they know their role well.

I like to wait at least 5-10 Premier League games before I can begin talk about a player's quality/ability. Some player take a while to adjust to a new league and others can succeed before teams realize how to deal with them. For me. it's simply not possible to say anything constructive about Van Ginkel at this point other than he is a promising player.

Rooney is 27, not 33. That point might not come for 2-3 years and I don't think Chelsea would be interested in Rooney if they thought that he wasn't likely to be their starter for the next few years at least. Rooney also works with this Chelsea team for a different reason. Chelsea want our attacking midfielders shooting and scoring and Rooney is great at holding the ball up and creating chances for other players. He not only had 12 goals last season, he had 10 assists. He had 3.7 long balls a game, he had 1.8 key passes, 0.6 crosses,he had 8 successful through-balls,etc... He is a fluid striker who fits in very well with our fluid attack (overlapping players making runs). Lukaku, right now is a more traditional #9/target man who doesn't fit quite as well with the rest of the squad we have right now. (We're not a team that is set up to feed the striker).

The academy system is over. Only Barcelona and Bayern have recently experienced sustained success using this method,and even then, their success is rather helped by being two of the very biggest spending teams in the world. (Also, both are playing in leagues with 0 and 1 other high spending club.). The academy system simply will not happen at Chelsea. To make academy players work, you need to play them in the first team and playing them in the first team means they will make mistakes and cost you points. Not only that, is that most academy players, no matter how good, will not be good enough for Chelsea, so you end up sacrificing points because maybe a player will turn out to be good enough. Chelsea have enough money where they don't need to do that. Chelsea has found good model, buying top young players from other teams and trying to balance them with experienced players. @cicero-I hate trying to differentiate modern football and traditional football with sentimentality that doesn't belong. Football has always been a business. You think people used to play simply because they loved playing? The difference is that before, players were treated like commodities to make millions for their clubs with no rights.

Which would be tapping-up. You can't talk to a player about their contract without permission of his current team and something like this would be too obvious to ignore.

He'd be a decent choice IF A) he'd renegotiate his contract and accept massively lower wages Our commitment was for no more than a year or two C) he wasn't expensive. The record of strikers in their 30's is not great and Eto'o hasn't played in a top competition for 3 years. Still, not sure why we'd need him really. I see why Chelsea are chasing a real #1 striker-Rooney would be easily our #1 choice at the #9, but is Eto'o at this point better than what we have? I'm not convinced.

Decent read for sure and some very interesting stats but also some ridiculous ones. Luiz's dominance in interceptions is no surprise and is, IMO, his main strength but it's nice to see the statistical evidence back up what we can see. Some of the other statistics are baffling to use. "Chances created" for example are based entirely on Luiz taking more shots especially free kicks from dangerous areas, something other no other CB really does. Yes, Luiz creates more chances, but he also took more shots than all the other CBs on the list combined and with a very poor success rate. (2 goals on 56 shots means you are taking far too many shots. Cahill, for example, had the same number of goals on 16 shots.) Like this previous omission the article conveniently ignores the biggest negative aspect of Luiz's game IMO which is that he tries to do too much offensively and is not efficient enough to justify it. Luiz had an 81% passing rate, easily the lowest on the list and a number that is very poor for a central defender. Kompany for example, had an 89% passing rate. Most of that difference comes from Luiz terrible percentage on long balls (55%, Kompany's for example was 73%)) which re-enforces those of us who believe that Luiz's game is much better when he keeps it simple and sticks as being a very good central defender instead of trying to run the attack. (Bad percentage shooter, bad percentage passer means a lot of turnovers for every positive result, way more than I would consider a good trade-off.)

I agree with @the only place to be above who says that getting players fit is far more important than results in pre-season (not even debatable IMO) but I also want to say that we didn't lose because we played Lampard. He struggled early, but we didn't concede because of him and he was actually responsible for 3 very good chances (the pass to Lukaku, the penalty shout, and the shot he had saved.). De Bruyne and Moses had a really good first 10 minutes of the second half, but after that were completely useless. Why would they have done any better? In other words, 1) we would have lost even with another player starting 2) it doesn't matter.

Pre-season has really started to get hyped up in the past few years. It is still meaningless, but people now pay way way too much attention to it. (These B.S. trophies and tournaments help). Maybe it's not a bad thing we lost. People were insanely overreacting to our wins so insanely overreacting to our loss brings things back to the middle somewhat.

Except...Real actually scored 3 goals with Van Ginkel on and 0 when he was off so that hardly works. (Not to mention that the last 5 minutes of friendlies where the result is already decided are almost always wide open like that) @ Shane-No. The second Ronaldo goal and a few other chances happened while MVG was on. I don't want to be too hard on him. he wasn't bad, he just wasn't particularly good either. He's being treated to "new, young player syndrome" whereby people will turn a decent game into a great one.

No injuries so I'm fine. I don't get why people are going crazy for Van Ginkel's performance. He made a couple of great tackles but especially in the second half, Madrid's midfielders were left completely alone in the box on a few occasions which is usually where the DM should be. I don't know who was responsible for picking up those men but I do know that if that were Mikel instead of MVG, many people would be blaming him for not picking up the trailing man.

Not everyone is acting like it. In fact, most people are acting like it matters a lot. The whole "put so and so on" or "we should start with this starting XI" says otherwise. (not to mention the near-endless ridiculous statements on players' overall ability or lack thereof based on 45 minutes in a meaningless game).

Thank you!!! Almost nobody seems to remember this. This game doesn't matter beyond some pride. We need to build our players up to be able to play for games that matter.

Good enough first half. Nobody injured. Generally decent play. Our attackers movement has been awful (not just Lukaku, they are way too narrow) and we've been really vulnerable to attacks down the right (Marcello and Ronaldo) If Chelsea do play 4-3-3 when it matters though, I hope they use a natural winger on the right.

People seriously complaining about pre-season lineups? The purpose of these games are for the manager to tinker and to get fitness. Mourinho is not trying to get the best team possible to win this game, he's trying to make the team more able to win when the games matter.

Yes, if the right amount for anyone comes in, we should sell them. Nobody is untouchable. None of these players bleed blue except for perhaps ones like Lampard and Terry who have been with us for over a decade. Luiz played longer at Benfica than he has at Chelsea.That's not to say that he isn't loyal, of course he is, just that this idea of players loving the club more than anything is a fan's projection of their own feelings, not the way players actually feel. Our players don't grow up loving Chelsea and play from the time they're kids. We buy them when they are older and they loyalty to Chelsea is literally because we pay them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this but it's the way things are. (Just as we are. If a company offered me double the salary i was getting now, I'd take it. We all would do that.) The money we're talking about for Luiz would make him the most expensive defender in history. Luiz is good, but like almost all players, he's replaceable and for that price, it'd be worth it.

Guitar and keyboards/piano. None great but all good enough for me to enjoy. I like fooling around with a lot of instruments though and play things like Ukelele, bass, Banjo, and Harmonica a tiny bit.

And Vidic was £7M and Kompany was £6M and Nastasic was what £10-12M? You don't always have to spend massively to get quality. I wouldn't sell Luiz easily though, It's late in pre-season and he's our best central defender. That said, an offer that would make him the highest paid defender in history would be impossible IMO, to turn down. That said, I don't see it happening.

I'd rather anyone with any small injury or fatigue be rested for the Hull game. It is maybe the easiest Premier League matchup we have all season and we should be able to win the game even with a lineup that is less than our regular starting XI.

Very strongly disagree. I think the Premier League is very easily the best league in the world because of the depth of the league and depth in two places. 1) Spurs, Everton, and Liverpool are all quality sides with a bunch of really good players and none of them even make a CL spot. No other league has quality like that missing CL spots. 2) Look at a team like Newcastle. 16th in the league last year, fighting for relegation. They have players who have been internationals for Holland, Argentina, France, Ivory Coast, and so on. Compare them to a team like Sevilla who finished 9th in Spain and is taking Marko Marin on loan. Newcastle's talent is significantly greater. Hell, QPR was the worst team in England and their keeper was the national team goalie for Brazil. The reason is simple. English teams spend much more money. Every year, English teams spend money buying players from other leagues. The Premier League is the buying league, constantly buying good players and great players from other leagues and very rarely does a top player go the other way. Spain doesn't even have all the top Spanish players anymore. Of the 23 players called up to the Confederations Cup, 8 play in England. Apart from Barcelona and Real Madrid, Spanish teams are always selling players to pay their bills. In the past 2 seasons, only Barcelona have a net transfer of more than 10M pounds in either season. 14 Premier League sides have hit the 10M pound mark in either of the last 2 seasons. Of course the English league is going to be much better! The Premier League has 163 internationals. That's 50 more internationals than any other league and almost 100 more internationals than Spain. 32% of the league is internationals. The Spanish League 14.3%. (Yes, I know internationals is not the only way to judge quality but it's not a bad one!) The Premier League always has a few week teams but it has easily the most difficult games, not just because there's real competition at the top (where there isn't in most leagues) but because the mid-table teams are filled with quality international players rather than mediocrity. I know it's fashionable to go on about other leagues, but the quality of player is simply much lower. (I actually think it's a real disadvantage for English teams in Europe too because you can't rest your players as often domestically because there are fewer easy games.)

Have a decent squad except their defenders. No idea why they sold Caulker. He's not brilliant but he's solid and they have no depth there.

No, but I expected him to be pushing for a starting position and not relegated to starting against poor sides and doing nothing at all in the league. He was literally useless in the Premier League.. His production could have been replaced with a player we got on a free. This is a player we spent 9M pounds or so on and despite our complete and utter lack of depth and us not having a single other RW, he never pushed for a starting spot under either manager and he barely played in any important games. It's not Messi or useless, you can be a very good rotation player and Moses wasn't. He literally didn't score well, didn't pass well, didn't defend well, was poor in the air, poor at finishing, poor at crossing, poor at holding up the ball...but he was useful because he scored 1 big goal and scored a few goals in crappy competitions against bad sides? People are so easily satisfied with a players' awful output if he's young. I expect players to actually, you know, contribute something. As I said before Kalou was better with us and people loathed him and couldn't wait to see him sold.

Yes, he's useless defensively which is why he's made 277 appearances for Chelsea under what, 8 different managers playing a variety of different systems? You don't like him, fine, but to call him useless defensively is patently absurd.

Because they are. We drew Brentford and we drew Juventus but they were not the same quality game. Was your previous stat just about Premier League totals? No, because Mikel's average goals against in Premier League starts was 1.2.Chelsea's average overall was 0.98. When you consider the higher caliber of opponent as well as the difference in style when Mikel was starting (under Benitez, we didn't play games like we did with the 4-2 Spurs win or the 3-2 ManU loss.), it's perfectly in line. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about Mikel. He doesn't offer much going forward, he moves the ball too slowly for our system, etc...but to even try to suggest that Mikel is costing the team a goal or half a goal a game is borderline insane. The worst defensive player in football doesn't do that and even Mikel's detractors (unless they are blind) know that he's a quality defensive player. His weaknesses are elsewhere.

Chelsea had, let's say, 10-12 really difficult games last season. (The top 4 competitors and Juventus home and away, Shakhtar away, and maybe you could call games like Everton or Liverppol away there as well). We played around 7 of those matches in the first 21 games. We played about 5 more in the next 47 games. (This is why "Benitez' success" drives me crazy. The schedule he had overall was ridiculously easy.) Chelsea had a large number of really easy games last season (around 25 games against teams that were bottom of the Premier League or lower caliber). Mikel started one game in the Carling Cup and it was against ManU. He started two games in the FA Cup and they were against ManU and Man City. He started 4 games in the UCL and they were the Juventus and Shakhtar starts. He started 19 games in the league and 12 of them were against top-10 teams. Of the 8 easiest games against Championship and First division sides, and Nordjaelland, Mikel started none of them (Moses, on the other hand, started 6 of them). .We gave up more goals when Mikel started because Mikel started a huge percentage of his games against top teams and none of his games against the worst teams so yes, it's harder to hold Juventus, Arsenal and ManU down than it is to hold Brentford, Leeds, and Sparta Prague.