TorontoChelsea

I'm not worried about Mourinho or anyone building a team. He didn't even build the team last time. Terry, Makalele, Lampard, Duff and Cole were there before Mourinho. Other that were bought without Mourinho even knowing who they were. That's what most managers do at top clubs. They have a core of a team and maybe bring a couple of players they know with them and go out and get another player or two they feel fits the team 's needs. We have the core of a team anyway, it's not like we need to go out and bring in 10 new players. I don't think Mourinho fits with Chelsea for a lot of reasons. Mostly, because Roman wants to play a specific brand of attacking football and Mourinho is not the coach to bring that. The players we've bought recently also don't fit into Mourinho-style football. I think Mourinho will either go to City or PSG as they both fit his profile (a team that has spent a ton of money and is in great position to succeed.)

Still in good shape in the league thanks to our two games in hand our earlier wins at Spurs and Arsenal (a loss against either would have meant they'd be on 33 and we'd be on 26. A draw to both (not a bad result) would mean we's be on 25 points and they'd both be on 31. However, it is tightening up in the league with a lot of teams vying for top-4 spots. This, to me, hi-lights the need to concentrate on the league over everything else. We'll get reinforcements in January but we're still not going to be a deep team.

Beausejour has been terrible. Horrible defending and atrocious crossing.

Well, I jinxed that. The game turned awful after I posted.

This Wigan/Arsenal game is way more entertaining than I thought it would be. Back and forth...well, mostly at one end but it's good, open, attacking football.

I don't know enough about him or how much he would cost to say if he'd be a good buy, but calling him an international is very generous. He's 25 and has 2 or 3 caps in friendlies for Argentina. He wasn't picked ahead of players like Gago or Mascherano. Countries just sometimes call up second-string players to play in meaningless friendlies. Both the friendlies I can find for Yacub, he played in lineups without any regulars (with players like Mouche, Hauche, and Valeri) Yacub is an international like Francis Jeffers and David Nugent were internationals and you certainly can't judge his ability based on having played 3 times for his national side.

A few ideas for possible articles... 1) Positional value. This is a big thing now in American football. I can tell you with very high accuracy what the most important to least important positions on the field are. in Football, you can tell by transfer fees what positions are most valued. (Strikers the most, keepers the least) but are they right? (Keepers are valued less because they are easiest to obtain not because they matter the least) 2) Overrated/aspects of football by the average fan. (For example, I think skill moves tend to be overrated and positioning underrated but everyone would have their own list..) 3) Big name signings and how they affected the club in the short and long terms Difficult to do, because transfers are not done in a vacuum but it's interesting. For example, the ten most expensive transfers in history (inflation included) the next season... Team better standing in league 4 Team same standing in league 3 Team worse standing in league 3 Better performance in CL3 Same performance in CL 2 Worse performance in CL4 (1 player, Vieri, didn't play in the CL) Summery, big signings have less impact on team performance than you might think. An interesting article which would go more in depth... 4) How much do managers really matter?

No, it's not how it works at all. If a TV costs $1,000 and you sell your old X-Box for $100, does the TV cost $900? No. It still costs $1,000. You just sold something else to get money to help you afford the TV. It doesn't make the TV any cheaper. It's like those Liverpool supporters who claim getting Andy Carroll was good business because it was Torres for Carroll and 15M pounds.Well, Liverpool had 50M pounds and they could have spent it any way they wanted. If we sell Sturridge for 12M pounds, we'll have 12M pounds to spend. We could spend it anywhere. It doesn't make any transfer cheaper or better value. Falcao is going to cost 48M pounds. That would make him, the 6th highest transfer (adjusting for inflation) ever. Chelsea could sell five players and it wouldn't change that. If Chelsea have 50M pounds to spend, they'd be much better off spreading it around in a few areas of need. Falcao does have a low bust potential but he has a high potential for not being worth what we would have to pay. Chelsea would be paying close to 20M pounds every year for Falcao (in amortized transfer payments and wages). To be worth what we would be paying him, Falcao would have to be just about the best striker in the world every year. The chances of that happening are slim.

That's not the way it works. If we sell Sturridge (very likely), it means we have 12M pounds to spend. It doesn't mean that if we bought Coentrao for 12M, we'd get him for free. (Moutinho is probably not worth 28.5, but that's his clause). You have a Falcao fetish.You think he can't fail. He can. Anyone can.

You completely missed what I wrote. I am not defending Torres. He has been horrible for us, a complete bust. I am defending reality. At the time Torres was considered a top striker and you're pretending that he wasn't. The point is not that 1.5 years is not "enough" for me, that point is that the 1.5 year period is specifically only chosen because it makes the author look correct. If you want to say "how did Torres do against big clubs at Liverpool", you look at how Torres did against big clubs (which was actually pretty well) not just for 1.5 years. Everyone thought Torres looked slower in the World Cup because he was coming off surgery. It was like thinking Drogba looked slower because he had malaria. Well, yeah. It takes time to get better and he did get better. In his last 15 Premier League games with Liverpool, he scored 8 goals. The normal reaction to that was "hey, he's finally getting his legs back". And yes, scoring against Stoke is not the easiest thing. It's another thing the article misses. At any given time, there are a handful (maybe 5) teams in the Premier League who are pushovers. Teams like Liverpool, Swansea, Fulham, and Newcastle are mid-table and below but still have a lot of quality and internationals. No other league in the world has anything close to that. And wanting Demba Ba or Holt or whoever is not ridiculous. It's called value. Demba Ba has a 7M pound release clause. He has scored 34 goals in 63 Premier League games. For what it would take to get Falcao, Chelsea could get something like Ba (7), Moutinho (28.5), and Coentrao (12M) or any other number of combinations that would improve our club much more than just one striker.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. I never said that defending is getting the ball away from the box as quickly as possible. If I had to define defending in a short sentence I'd say it was just marking your man and being positionally aware. Luiz's issues are clearly not easy to fix because he has not fixed them. Rafa is Luiz's 4th manger under Chelsea and I doubt any of them have told him "hey David, go wherever you want". He either hasn't listened to his managers or just can't control himself. And yes, he was absolutely at fault for the goal against Leeds. It was not a misplaced long ball or anything. Chelsea were bombing forward. We were moving into an attacking position and that's what they are supposed to do and Luiz was about 30 yards more forward than he safely should have been and tried a cute pass which failed miserably. Defenders can get that forward but they have to be extremely cautious if they do because if you give up possession, the other team will counter with numbers . And it wasn't about team imbalance. Oscar was back and Ivanovic and Azpilicueta were back (and Bertrand was on his man a little behind the play) but Leeds got four men forward and because Luiz was way out of position, we had 3 men back. We were imbalanced because Luiz made us imbalanced. If it were MIkel instead of Oscar, he wouldn't have looked so lost, but a 4-3 counter-attack is difficult to defend no matter what. As for the Premier League being the best defensive league, I never said it was. It used to be Italy by a wide margin, but I don't know anymore. Anyway, the numbers would be useless in deciding because you'd also have to take in account the best offensive teams as well. I would certainly be very wary of buying (many) elite defenders from Spain and thinking they'd be elite in the Premier League in a way I wouldn't about top defenders in Italy.

I don't think it's just British thinking, I think it's a real reflection on what it takes to succeed in different leagues. You can be a successful defender in Spain or Brazil or Portugal and be a lot more loose defensively. In England (as in Germany and Italy) you need to defend first. Elite Premier League defenders have been guys like Terry, Adams, Vidic, Kompany, etc...It's not that they can't be skilled and good at moving the ball, the best ones are, it's that their job is first and foremost to defend.

Haven't watched him much at all. For what it's worth http://www.whoscored.com/Players/73084 And he's definitely not playing pivot, he's playing CM and actually close to attacking central midfield in some games.

First off, no matter what you think of the piece, it doesn't change the fact that all this is retroactive. If Falcao or whoever came here and failed we could go back like this and find the reasons why afterwards as well. (Language barrier, playing style, coaching tactics, inexperience in the Champions League, whatever, there are always possible reasons/excuses). Now, on the piece itself. So many problems, the piece was written to try to prove a point, but here a few obvious problems... 1) Why count 1.5 years of Torres? You can count post-injury or something and it would make some sense even though that's a small sample size. The only reason the writer chose that 1.5 year period is because the year before Torres scored against Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea, ManU, Everton, and Real Madrid among others which blows his nonsense out of the water. The year before that, he scored against Chelsea, Inter, Porto, Spurs, etc...Torres was with Liverpool for 3.5 years and scored against many many top sides. Saying Torres didn't score against top teams before he joined us is just being dishonest 2) You can't count every game as equal. Torres scored two goals against us in an important league game. Falcao scored a hattrick in a meaningless exhibition game which our players never showed up for. Scoring in the Champions League is harder than scoring in the Europa League where many top teams don't even play their top players, scoring the 5th goal in a 5-1 game is not the same as scoring the winner in a 1-0 game and so on...and you certainly can't count our game against Athletico as a real game and then not count the Community Shield as one (because Torres scored against City which again goes against the author's point in writing this) 3) Probably the biggest problem-This is what it's like with almost all strikers. Torres has been spectacularly bad against decent clubs post-transfer, but his record pre-transfer was normal for a top striker. He scored some goals in big games (Chelsea, Benfica, ManU, etc...) and scored most of his goals against poor teams. Strikers score way more goals against worse opposition because worse opposition lets in more goals. For example Falcao's 17 league goals this year, 8 came in two games against the two worst defensive sides in La Liga . That's the way it works. That's not to say that Torres is good enough or anything. He does pretty much only score against poor opposition and has been like that since he joined us, but was not when he was at Liverpool. Falcao would be much better than Torres without much doubt, but that's not the point. . You keep trying to create this alternate world where everyone should have known that Torres was going to fail. It wasn't like that. Torres was widely considered one of the best strikers in the world when he bought him and yes, he failed. Lots of players fail. And that's the point. Players disappoint, players get hurt, players need time to adjust and for Falcao to be worth his 50M pounds and what would be a massive wage bill, he would have to score 25-30 goals a year every single season for the length of his contract. The chances of Falcao being worth what we pay for him would be slim. The chance of it being a big mistake are relatively large and the cost would be massive (look how much Torres has cost this club). In the era of FFP and with a team with multiple holes, it simply doesn't make sense to take such a massive risk.

He was very good except for the mistake and then him trying to make up for it (which he tends to do) where he over-persued players for a few minutes after. I actually thought his best moment was a great interception and dribble in defence before giving a nice outlet pass in defence. It was all just so smooth and calm. We had a lot of players that could have been MOTM. Nobody had a fantastic match that blew you away but we had a lot of players who were very good. Lampard, Moses, Mata, Luiz, and Hazard were all excellent. (I agree with you on Hazard BTW, he was excellent but was involved in the 4th and 5th goals when the game was already over.)

Yeah, I can agree with that. I'd rather he be used with Lampard and Oscar as the defensive side of the pivot. Has the potential to be good IMO It's bad luck for us to have Romeu go down when Mikel is going to be away. Normally, two DMs is enough cover. But that's the thing with depth. You don't need it until you need it.

I wouldn't say that at all. Most of Luiz's long balls are either him playing the ball to open players ahead of him (Mikel, Cole, Ivanovic) which tend to be successful or him trying to pick out attackers and his success rate on those passes is just awful. I am fine with seeing Luiz as a defensive midfielder because our top-2 DMs are both out and if he thrives there, then of course he should stay.

Except that Lampard and Oscar are both better passers than Luiz so moving to Luiz to the midfield for his passing instead of one of the others makes no sense. If you want him there for the defensive part of the formation, I can see Luiz there as a stop-gap measure, but I've never understood why people are so keen on moving Luiz to midfield.

This is what drives me crazy about the discussion around Luiz. He made a fantastic pass today, but he makes a ton of long ball passes and most of them are awful. It's the same with everything he does. He'll score a goal and people will talk about putting him at striker. He'll score one goal on a free kick and everyone forgets the 50 useless free kicks he had before. Luiz has a 62% passing rating on long balls this season. To compare, Mata is 72%, Lampard is 79%, Oscar is 76%, Mikel is 76%. Luiz is actually our worst long ball passer in terms of inefficiency, not our best.

It was OK. Wouldn't play it against top sides though but then again we're only playing those two thanks to Mikel and Romeu being unavailable so we don't have much choice. Those saying "awful" or anything though are just full of it. We had control of the midfield the entire match.

Loved the Ivanovic/Lampard celebration after Ivanovic's goal. It was really emotional. Sort of a mixture of joy, sadness, and relief.

A lot of good performances and a very satisfying result. The fact that Leeds went up one and gave them hope only to have us smash them completely makes it that much sweeter.

Such a satisfying win.

Just a beautiful pass by Luiz! Nice finish by Hazard. This one is over...time to take off Mata.

Am I wrong or do Leeds now have White, Green, and Brown on?