TorontoChelsea

What a ball by Piazon!

Hazard with some great moves.

We really could have 7 or 8 and should have 6.

Ha! Saw this tweet..."Great to hear the fans singing 'Sign him (Lampard) up'.., too right!!"-Jody Morris

Is Villa playing with 9 men? They just look awful.

BTW...Lampard 11 for 11 long balls, 3 key passes, 90% passing.1 interception, 1 blocked shot. Not bad at all!

FRANK!

Fantastic half. Easy which is what it should be. Pretty much everyone (except Mata and Moses) played well. Would love to see this end 5, 6 nil. Actually, if I were Benitez, I'd take Mata off at half time. He needs to rest..

I know...I was confused for a few seconds. I thought he was kicking it out on purpose because someone got hurt.

3-0!

Fantastic free kick! Had a feeling this one was going to go in.

What a start!

Agreed...have to go make a coffee and settle in for the match.

Of course Jose is one of the most successful managers of the decade. He spent the decade at Chelsea, Inter Milan, and Real Madrid. The AVERAGE net transfer of his clubs when he was with them is around 85M pounds a year. Average. So, he went to teams that were in second place, first place, and second place in their leagues, spent more on average every year than any individual club spends a season on average and he won with them and you think it's because of his genius? What do you think would happen if Arsenal hired a new manager and spent 80M in the transfer market next year? What if Everton hired a new manager and spent 150M pounds? They'd do very well not because the new manager is some sort of genius, but because spending money=winning..

Those are different. Those people founded those companies (and invented the products), they were not managers. I think managers do make a difference, but it's very slight.

I don't think they are particularly important. I think it's more about people liking a narrative. Man City is going to win a bunch of things in the foreseeable future. If it's still Mancini there, people will talk about the importance of stability. If they bring someone else in, they'll talk about how Mancini couldn't deliver and they needed Mr. X. in order to take them further. It's similar with Chelsea. We'll start to win things again in the next couple of years because we've spent too much money and have too much talent not to and whoever our manager is when we do will get the credit. As long as the manager can communicate, can handle egos, and has the respect of players, I don't really care about anything else and I don't think it matters. (It's like CEOs in most companies. The stock goes up, everyone loves them, stock goes down, they want them fired even if the stock fluctuation was almost certainly due to circumstances they had no control over.)

Really not much choice in starting lineups with so little depth all over the pitch. We should win this game no matter who started.

That's absolutely not what happened at Inter. I work with a die-hard Inter fan and we were talking about this last week. The first year, Inter let Mourinho sign who he wanted and it was an absolute disaster. He bought three players and they all sucked. Inter still won the league as they had the previous four seasons because they were a dominant squad. The next year, the board made the transfers and brought in Milito, E'to, Lucio, Motta, and Sneijder which is was incredible business and is what made the difference. And Inter is exactly what I'm talking about. They had won the league four years in a row before Mourinho got there. It's not like he had to go to a mid-table side and win. I'm not knocking him for going where he wants. I'd do the same. I'm knocking the people that pretend that managers make a massive difference..The people that think that new manager would come in and we'd suddenly solve our problems. Our two most successful managers in Europe were Grant and RDM neither of whom had any experience at a top club or were well-regarded as coaches. Have a look at this article. It explains pretty much how I feel about managers. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/82601a98-837a-11de-a24e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Ft744jM1

It depends how you define success. He was very good at Roma, he took Juventus from Seria B to third place...but he really was not in very many good situations. This is really my point about managers.How many clubs would you deem to have had success in the last decade? Maybe about 10-15. If you weren't lucky enough to get a job on one of those clubs, you simply weren't going to have sustained success. It remains exactly the same. This is what makes Mourinho so smart in how he chooses his jobs. He only goes to clubs where he knows he has a very good chance of having success and only stays a few years. That's why I think City makes so much sense for him. They are a team that's going to have success over the next few years regardless of who their manager is.

You have to remember that City were in a very different place from us when they get their sugar daddy. We were in 4th place and in a Premier League where spending 10M pounds on a player was a significant buy. When their Sheik took over, Man City were a mid-table team and their insane spending just didn't improve the team the way ours could. It was always going to take them longer but even then, it was only 3 years. City are going to be a force in England and in Europe in the very near future because they have the money.

It's 95% the money. The teams that spend the most money, win. It's not a correlation, it's causation.

I've always felt really sorry for Ranieri. He was really the one that nurtured Lampard and Terry. Lampard was runner up to FWA player of the year before Mourinho arrived. It was Ranieri that first brought Terry into the side and first made him captain (when Desailly didn't play). It was Ranieri who was responsible for buying J. Cole, Cech, Robben, Makalele, and Gallas. I have no doubt that we would have won under Renieri as well (we got better every year under him) but he wasn't Roman's guy so he never got to see the benefit of Cech, Robben, Carvalho, Drogba, and Ferreira. I just can never understand why we think of the teams as Mourinho's when the core was almost all from before he arrived. Of the most common starting XI when we first won the league, only the Portuguese players were Mourinho's buys. He had the personality to manage the side which is no small feat, but we've won because of Roman's money not because of genius managers.

This is my favourite Clash song. Great tune with fantastic lyrics including one of my favourite all-time lines..."but I believe in this and it's been tested by research/he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

Could not disagree with this more. Falcao is a much better fit for a Mourinho sort of system where there is a big need for a target man and someone who thrives on counter-attacks. In Guardiola's system, what he needs from the striker are very different. He likes forwards who can pass, who can do layoffs well, who can go wide and drop deep, who can read plays developing and who are versatile. You look at the players Pep liked at striker, Ibrahimovic, Messi, and Villa and all of them are very different than Falcao. He needs his strikers to be very involved in the build-up of the attack, not as the guy waiting in the box for a cross to come in. Messi averages over 58 passes a game. Ibrahimovic averaged 40. Rooney 49, Van Persie 29. Falcao averages 20.5 which means he touches the ball less than almost any other striker you can think of. The best fit for Guardiola for players we have been rumoured to be interested in IMO is Jovetic who can dribble, pass, links up well, and can finish.

It's American football. Robert Griffin III. He's the quarterback for Washington.