TorontoChelsea

Can you imagine? I'd have a great deal of respect for a top manager who went to a poor club because he wanted a real challenge. They don't because they know that there are only 10 teams in the world that even have a chance to win anything important with any regularity. If they go anywhere else, they simply will not win and therefore will not be considered top managers. Managers like Rafa or Mourinho are smart. They won't take jobs somewhere anywhere except at those 10 teams.

I think Wesley Sneijder takes up the space on the pitch where Van Persie likes to be which forces him too far forward where he's not as comfortable. He's not a target-man. He needs to be able to roam a bit and drop deeper and pick up the ball. With Holland, he has to sit around and wait for service more which is not his game. .

Well, who could really have expected anything else? Liverpool looked vastly better (like a different team) with Sturridge on. He even had 3 key passes....Arteta hurt for Arsenal but Nasri, Toure, and Aguero out for City.

Yeah, can't complain about luck. ManU should be up by 2 or 3 based on play.

Sturridge!

And he passes instead of shooting. He should have shot.

That video deserves its own thread (where, by rule, every post has to include the video itself.) We can do, maybe a semiotic breakdown of the video, a body-language reading, and linguistic reading, and so on... Have no idea how Liverpool are still in this game. If this were us playing Liverpool, we'd regret not putting them away because we'd concede. I love how they pretend they are still a big club but they are nowhere near that, Then, they pretend that if they had their druthers, they'd choose winning 30 years ago over winning today because history matters more than the present or something. Their transfers have been mostly horrible for a long while. Their last big signings have been Sturridge, Allen, Downing, Henderson, and Carroll. That's like 100M pounds without getting any top players.

You still can even though Talkchelsea has a strict policy against posting something more than once. BTW, have you ever seen a video of Harry Redknap defending Lampard in 1996? Good stuff.

Mourinho at the match!

You are just so disingenuous about Lampard, it's ridiculous. You can't even admit when he's excellent. 2 goals against Everton? He was "pretty good". Scores both goals in a 2-1 win and you couldn't even bring yourself to vote for him as MOTM. You kept harping on about how apart from the goals he wasn't that good. Great game against Stoke where he drives our attack and is responsible for pretty much everything positive we did? He was "decent" . Even worse than that, you use a caveat. He was decent "but" as if even saying that he was decent is too much for you to admit. Yet, you keep bringing up the QPR game as if he was one of our worst players. He was poor, but he certainly wasn't among the main culprits for that loss. He's been one of our top performers in 3 of the last 4 games and the only game you want to talk about is the one he wasn't. You complain constantly about being tired of this topic, but If Lampard does anything poorly, you are the first to post about it and then exaggerate it to an insane degree and then repeat it over and over again. You post as much on this thread as anybody. You are clearly not tired of the topic, you just get tired of the topic when Lampard is playing well. Yes, my description of shiny new toy syndrome does not apply to every single supporter who thinks that Chelsea should move on from Lampard, but it's the biggest driving force behind the majority of them. I've never seen a single supporter who wants Lampard gone who also doesn't think that our academy, which has produced zero good players in over a decade, is full of the next FIFA team of the year players. And your analogy is false. There is nobody here that is going to stop supporting Chelsea when Frank leaves. There is nobody who is singing his name at games who is not going to support Chelsea when leaves. Nobody is saying that Lampard should get 150K a week and be guaranteed to start every game or anything. We simply think that he's one of the greatest Chelsea players ever and that's he's certainly good enough to still play a role at Chelsea. Supporting a club doesn't mean supporting everything the club does. It doesn't mean supporting every single person involved in the club. You're constantly pointing out to people how you are more of a supporter as if you've been following Chelsea since 1946 and have attended every single match they've ever played or something.

Too many strikers. City and United can get away with having 4 strikers because they play with two at the same time so it's 4 players for 2 spots. We have one striker position so whoever the third striker is would never get to play. If you're going to buy Falcao or Lewandowski or any big name striker, you want him starting 35-40 games. That leaves 20-25 more starts. Last year, we played 61 games and our #3 striker started 4 times. Is Ba going to be happy starting 10 games a year? Is Lukaku going to develop barely getting to play? Chelsea need two strikers and then someone else who can play there if needed. I'm also fine with having our third striker as someone from the academy who could fill in, in case of emergency much like Ake is doing this year.

Our fans aren't booing all the time at home. They booed after 90 minutes against Swansea. They were still trying to encourage the side until the end. They still sing the same songs on the road. I heard "We don't care about Rafa" and "One Di Matteo" etc.. in away games as well. These are players used to playing in front of supporters yelling horrible things at them. You make it sound as if when we're away, the fans are completely supportive and at Stamford Bridge, it's a constant tirade of insults. The truth is that we're just an inconsistent team right now. That's it.

This is the narrative people want to go with, but it's not true. Supporters were booing us at home because we are playing horrible, not the reverse. If is it the indeed the case that the occasional chant causes our players such distress that they can't perform well enough to beat QPR or Swansea at home, then we are doomed.

Would like this signing. 10M euros is cheap and Aspas has been great this year. Low risk, high reward move. Not sure where he'd play though. (Unless Torres gets sold/sent on loan..)

Yes I can. I am positive that the decision not to renew Lampard's contract has nothing to do with money or skill. It's about simply wanting to move on. That's not the decision I would make, but I am not a Russian billionaire who owns Chelsea. (just checked my bank balance to make sure. No, definitely not a billionaire.). And as for Lampard's decline, yes it's obvious he's not that player he was a few years ago, but he is still one of Chelsea's better players. Last season, despite playing much of the year in the pivot, Lampard created a scoring chance every 41 minutes. Fellaini who played the same positions as Frank (central midfield and in the pivot) created a chance once every 114 minutes. Ramires, once every 93 minutes. He still scored more goals than any other midfielder, even from open play. I think Opta Stats ranked him as the 21st best player in the Premier League last season. In his last 4 starts for us, he's been a legitimate MOTM contender in three of them. For the last few years now many people want to see Lampard go (mostly because of "shiny new toy syndrome" which is a fetishization of the new and of theoretical potential, permeates fandom) and have exaggerated his decline (and ignore his quality) but he still keeps on producing. You look at the game today and Chelsea had about 3 or 4 very good scoring chance and 4 goals and Lampard was key to all of them except the Hazard goal. He had two fantastic over the top passes to put players in on goal. One to set up Ba's chance and a sumptuous one to Mata that led to the penalty. He got himself into great positions for the two scoring chances. He was 7 for 9 in long balls and did his work defensively as well-only Ramires had more tackles than Lampard. He is clearly good enough for Chelsea and would very likely still be good enough to play a role on the team for a couple of years. I think it's silly that we're going to let him go, but I don't make the decisions and he can't stay around forever. I started supporting Chelsea before Lampard and I will support them after.

It should be mentioned that in addition to the two own goals and the missed penalty, Walters also managed to kick the ball of his own face which is a a pretty nifty trick.

Stoke doesn't counter. They have zero goals off the counter-attack this season. Not saying Oscar should have started, he's been pretty poor lately, but it's not as if Bertrand was needed to cover Robben and Lahm.

This is my favourite own goal...truly one of the best finishes I've ever seen.

It's more than that. Lampard should have scored on one of those, but...I was never upset at Torres for missing those sort of chances. If you do the technical things right and you're finishing is just a little off, it's OK. Lampard got into good positions, shot quickly, and got both shots with decent pace on net forcing two very good saves. The problems with Torres are that 1) He doesn't get into those positions. He would have been standing somewhere 20 feet away. 2) He wouldn't have shot right away. He would have tried to do that stupid crossover thing to try to get a shot on an empty goal which the defender would have knocked away or the keeper would have smothered. 3) Had he got the shot off, it would have missed the target, and maybe, if we were lucky, we'd get a corner off a deflection. It's the difference between doing things right and missing on the execution and just doing things all wrong.

Hmm you're entitled to your opinion like i am - but against Stoke that was a great performance... Lampard was great today, Hazard gave the ball away soooo much and his goal papered over an average performance. But it's his first season, he will learn... I wouldn't call Hazard performance average, I'd say it was uneven but overall very good. He was brilliant for a lot of the game but was also really poor for parts of it. (which is why people not watching the game were confused by the thread. Posts of "Hazard is amazing" followed by "Hazard is so wasteful"). I would say something similar about Ramires. Very wasteful going forward, but his defensive work was fantastic. He had 7 tackles. Next highest on the team was 2. MOTM was easily Lampard for me. Not only was he involved the first three goals, he was involved in almost every scoring chance Chelsea had. He set up Ba for his shot, he sent a few players into great positions with passes, and he himself had a couple of great chances (he should have scored at least one mind you). Also thought Ba played well, holding up the ball like a striker should and getting into dangerous positions Luiz and Ivanovic looked really solid and as always when he keeps his game in check, Luiz played very well.

What's kind of amusing is that we had so many legit penalty shouts earlier in the year, but at least 3 of our 4 last penalties were probably not penalties. I guess it does even out.

Walters. What a game!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sian_Massey

Looks like Terry coming on...