TorontoChelsea

There is a fair bit that can be done. Mata started three games against Sparta, Brentford, and Sparta. An absolute waste of his energy. Everyone's energy is finite which is why so many of us keep emphasizing the importance of sitting players in the Europa League. Worst case scenario. We lose next round... I'm not going to blind myself and walk the land like Oedipus...It doesn't really matter. Worst case scenario in the league. We miss the CL, miss out on a lot of money, probably miss out on some players, and we miss out on the CL next year again. That is a big big deal.

Exactly. Lukaku has generally played very well this year, but Chelsea right now do not play a system where strikers can succeed. We are a team that's set-up around our attacking midfielders which leads to the best chances falling to our midfielders. (This is not to excuse Torres, he's been awful, but our system also doesn't help strikers). WBA plays a system that works around setting up the striker. WBA's top three scorers are all strikers. Chelsea's top three scorers are all midfielders. I'd rather Chelsea bring in a new manager next year, get a system in place that fits the team and is working and then bring back Lukaku. I'm less worried about KDB because he is versatile enough to play in any system, but one always has to be concerned if a young striker has a tough spell that they may lose confidence. I wouldn't be against bringing Lukaku back, but I don't think it's a given no matter how well he does. (First things first, Torres needs to go.)

I have no problem with that. I don't even have a problem buying our young players like we did with De Bruyne, Courtois and Lukaku. It works. The issue is this: we've spent in the 20M and over range on six players in the last three years. Only one, Mata, I would consider close to top-level. Hazard is not far behind. Ramires and Luiz are good but flawed players. Oscar has promise. Torres is not even worth mentioning. In that same period ManU has spent 20M+ on one player. Robin Van Persie. When you spend elite money, you should be getting elite players a lot of the time. We're not.

They do have good people, but it doesn't matter, because you could put idiots in charge and if you are outspending everyone 10/1, you should win the league easily. Some of their signings are working out, some have been poor. Pastore, Lavezzi, and Veratti cost about 75M and have been pretty mediocre in lesser league. Thiago Silva is excellent, but 35M and 160K/week on a five year contract a 28 year old central defender? That's just crazy money. And Lucas Moura has looked good early on, but 45M Euros for an unproven player? That's a massive risk. It's the Chelsea 2003/2004 model where you just spend so much that some players turn out and the ones that don't, don't matter because you'll just spend 100M more the next season. That model is why we're in the trouble we're in. Massive, reckless spending on prestige signings.

PSG are doing an awful job. They've spent about 10X more than the next highest spending club in France over the past five years and they're only 3 points clear. PSG spent around 125M this year. Next highest spending team? 4.4M. They're going to win but not because they're run well, but because they spend so much more than anyone else.

That time was a while ago. We need a captain at the head of our ship and we've just got Cap'n Crunch.

Bale is simply one of the best players in the world right now.

It was dirty and pointless. We were up 4-0 and the game was over. Keane was an incredibly dirty player. The Haland incident is one of the worst and Haland should have sued him for assault really. Being tough is good but it means tackling hard but clean. There's no place for that sort of shit. Luiz apologized like he should have and hopefully it will be a one-time thing. Everybody does stupid things.

Mata was actually pretty poor today overall but still found the space and class to score the winning goal and set-up the precious third one. The ability to not play great and still contribute massively is something top players seem to able to do..

He doesn't have hope. He's just a Liverpool fan who trolls this blog because he has a thing for Rafa.

Absolutely excellent stuff. I love to see the personal celebrations of Chelsea supporters and you mixed those in perfectly with TV coverage of the game. Also, love the pigeon...made me want to sing "10 German Bombers in the Air" except with "the pigeons from Chelsea shot them down".

Didn't really bother me. Everyone always roots for the underdog so talking about Brentford's bravery or whatever was to be expected. It's more condescending than anything. ("oh look at those brace lads...they're trying soooo hard") If it's two Premier League teams or in the CL, it's different.

Yes, but one can always hope. Really wish we could have rested a couple more players today as well. Brentford at home would have been the perfect time to do that.

That's two excellent games for Oscar in a row...maybe he's starting to adapt?

Beautiful ball from Oscar, great finish by Terry.

Sometimes, it's so simple. Hit a long ball, knock it down, score. Nice finish by Mata.

The loan made complete sense. He was getting no time at Chelsea and is going to get games in Spain. The loan policy has worked very well this year but...the board still screwed up by not ensuring that we have enough players actually at Chelsea. How we started the season with one striker and no real central midfielders is beyond me.

I think they actually should have just come to a buyout settlement once he was not going to get transferred. Pay him a mutually agreed upon percentage of his remaining salary and release him (maybe with a clause that he can't play in the Premier League or against Chelsea or something). Chelsea save money. Malouda gets all in all, probably the same amount of money and gets to play. There are so many ways that this could have been handled better.

What an awful injury it was too. Finished him completely. I give him a pass because he played so few games with us (10). And as bad as he was, 1 goal in 10 games was still triple the scoring rate of Chris Sutton in the league. 1 goal for $10M pounds (in 1999 when that was a lot of money!!!) Jesus...

These things usually turn out to be nothing. Wasn't Torres threatening to tell the real story of leaving Liverpool? Chelsea is going to look bad because they already look bad from this, but they are paying his contract so it's not like they're screwing him, so it's a minor issue that won't result in any loss of sponsorship or anything.

We didn't damage football on our own. Real Madrid, City, Liverpool, Barcelona, ManU, (and now clubs like PSG and Zenit) and other clubs helped, but we played and continue to play a massive role in the explosion of transfer fees and salaries. In 02-03, the net spending for all the teams in the Premier League was 181M pounds. Then Roman came along and spent that 100M more than that over the next two years. The most any English club had ever spent in one year was roughly 40M pounds. Roman spent 150M in the first year. We didn't care how much we spent. Roman just wanted someone and bought them. City did the same sort of thing. It's been awful for football.

We've had people who have been wastes with Chelsea...many players, but none quite like Torres. As expensive and useless as Chris Sutton was, we got rid of him after one year. Torres is an albatross around the neck of the club. He's making what, 170K? 180K a week for 3 more years? Who the hell is going to pay that? Everyone knows we paid 50M for him so selling him for a pittance would be embarrassing. I don't care though. It needs to be done. For the club to move on, he needs to go. Maybe he can regain his form elsewhere. I don't care. He just needs to go. I'm sick of him being a topic. I'm sick of players and managers making excuses for him. I'm just so tired of it all.

Meaningless to me because the site breaks down calls into "correct" and incorrect" and variations of those and it's not that simple. How many 50/50 calls are there? How many off-sides are impossible to tell? Referees will call fouls differently at different parts of the game. (Let it flow early and call fouls if starts getting chippy) And who exactly is doing the referee reviews? Which clubs do they support? (originally, all Arsenal). Do they have a bias in their analysis? Does their idea that ManU gets all the calls play into their watching of the game? What were the bad calls that went for United? Were they meaningless calls that didn't actually effect their record? (Getting a penalty in 5-1 win, etc..) The problem is that the site is trying to pretend that its math is objective, complete with charts and graphs, when it is subjective analysis analyzed. And anyway, here's this which says exactly the opposite for last year. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/9258810/Manchester-United-have-cause-for-complaint-as-unique-survey-highlights-Premier-League-errors.html

They don't win by luck. They win because they're a better team than most teams and because the other top clubs this season in the Premier League are in poor form. Home clubs get extra calls, good clubs get extra calls, and big clubs get extra calls but even these are fairly minor and they apply across the board. Chelsea get calls too. ManU are not particularly lucky but peoples' perception of randomness and how common things actually occur is off (which leads to conspiracy theories in general) ManU have had plenty of bad calls against them as well and we get plenty of good calls. What about last season? Referees could have handed ManU the title with ease by just calling one innocuous foul at the end of the last City game or having a little less extra time making a comeback impossible. It would have so easy. ManU win more late games because they are better than most teams. Teams that win more games are more likely to win more games late as they are likely to win more games early and more games in the middle. Anyway, just to show you how ridiculous this whole "ManU always pulls it out in the last minute" thing is. You know how many wins ManU has getting the winning goal in the 80th minute or later this season?.Five. Chelsea? Also five. And Luck? What about our last year in the CL. One of the luckiest runs in football history. Roman must have bribed people, right? In order for there to be some sort of conspiracy in football, it would have to involve hundreds of people, be completely unnoticed by neutral observers and objective statistics, cost millions and millions of pounds, and never have a single leak... for what reason? What benefit is there to anybody other than Manu that ManU wins games? And if there were a conspiracy, why would ManU buy expensive players at all. They could win and save tens of millions of pounds every year. Why wouldn't it ever be noticed by objective journalists? Why would no record of it ever be found? This is why I hate conspiracy theories. They don't make any sense if you look at them rationally. You either think that ManU is the best team in the Premier League this season or that there is some massive conspiracy. Occam's razor wins again. And how are ManU boring to watch? They're the highest scoring team in the Premier League and they concede plenty of goals as well. I don't like ManU, but I'm sick of the ridiculous conspiracy theories. I also hate the "Manure" and "Liverscum" sort of thing. We're not Chel$ki and we're not 12 years old. It's possible to dislike other clubs without resorting to childish name calling every single time you reference them. I have friends who are supporters of most of the clubs in the Premier League. We disagree obviously, but I don't understand why "I support Chelsea" also has to turn into "every other club is shit and they're useless scum who need to die and even writing a proper name for their shit clubs is offensive" I don't care about Spurs or Liverpool or Barcelona. I want Chelsea to do well. That's what supporting a club is about. (rant over)

How are ManU destroying the game? I don't like them at all but we and City have certainly done more damage in the past decade to football than ManU has.