TorontoChelsea

Many and they're legal in Canada, just much more expensive. I actually have a connect from a farmer who sells amazing cigars for basically $1 each so brought 30 of those back. (also, a big bottle of high quality rum). Good thing it was all legal because customs absolutely raped me coming back in. Made me show them all my photos and asked who everyone was, emptied my suitcases, checked for hidden compartments. It was ridiculous.

Back from Cuba....fantastic trip and I'd like to share a funny and sad Chelsea moment I had there. I wore my Chelsea shirt and was given a few thumbs up from Cubans but one guy in Havana stopped me and wanted to talk. "Chelsea are the best", he said in halting but perfectly understandable English. "Drogba was the best but...he not there now." He paused..."Torres..." a pained look crossed his face "not so good". Even in a country where real facts can be hard to come by, they know the truth about Torres.

It's actually the composition of the soil but that's not quite as funny. I do love a good cigar a few times a year and even the best ones are so cheap there. The thing I'm most looking forward to? Today in Toronto is -3. Tomorrow in Havana is 29.

Off to Cuba for a week and internet will likely be spotty at best. Hopefully, I'll come back and find out Chelsea have won both their games and Benitez was fired and Chelsea have an agreement to sell Torres in the summer...one can dream.

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.

There's some sort of sick irony to this. Benitez helped ruin Torres by overplaying him even when he was hurt (Liverpool never bought a decent second striker which is their fault and Torres rushed back from surgery for the World Cup which was his fault) and now he's counting on the player he helped ruin rescue his own career. It's almost like a Greek tragedy. Starring: Fernando Torres as the former hero, blind to his own flaws and still thinks he is the warrior of days long since passed. Rafa Benitez as the mad king Chelsea Football Club as the beautiful maiden raped by the hero and murdered by the king Roman Abromavich as Zeus who plays with the mortals as is his will

To be fair, what's he or anyone else going to say? "Torres is shit"? This is what you'll hear from every Chelsea source...empty platitudes about how things have been rough for the poor bastard and he's not doing badly and he's turning things around, etc...I'm just so sick of Torres and the circus that surrounds him.

Maybe, maybe not but you can't buy young, talented players and then just buy other ones to play ahead of them. We simply don't need another #10 player. We're set. We have real needs on the team and we need to address those.