TorontoChelsea

Yeah, it does. That's why it has me feeling off.

The away kits with blue shorts look odd to me. More used to the all white. Edit:White and black maybe

Stupid bubbles...

Very early for us in the Americas. 7:45 AM match on a Saturday is tough! (And that's Eastern Time.)

Because it wasn't 0-0 which is the only draw that counts!

I know it's harder on the players, but I much prefer this playing twice a week thing...

Can't imagine them both sitting. Generally, unless Chelsea are going to move Oscar to deep lying midfielder, I would prefer a rotation of 2 of Hazard, Oscar, and Mata and one of Moses (mostly) and Marin (and maybe Sturridge if we buy a new striker in January)

I've found this at a few different forums. Look, some opinions are stupid and deserve to be shot down ("Mata sucks, we need to buy Downing and Henderson who are amazing" etc...) but there is a general realm of sanity where people can disagree. You need to be able to express difference of opinion and feel that it will not be shot down just because your opinion differs from that of the moderator. I was shocked when I went to look at another forum a couple of months ago, at how they sneered at any dissenting viewpoint or evaluation of a player, no matter how reasonable Moderators attack people who have different opinions so that the only people that stay are sycophants who all agree with each other. Not only does this make forums dull (conflict is the essence of drama) but it makes them stupid. If you do not allow yourself to even listen to other viewpoints, then you blind yourself.

http://www.thesun.co...nitez-boos.html Although I am loath to quote from The Sun and the article itself is a bit light, the Lampard effect charts are very interesting. Last 2 seasons with Lampard. 37 matches, 21 wins, 7 draws, 9 losses. 15 games without Lampard, 4 wins, 8 draws, 3 losses. Almost everyone was blaming Lampard for everything earlier this season. Turns out, they were wrong.

It depends what happens in the league IMO. If City don't win, Mancini will be out, if they do win, I think he'll probably stay. The City job would naturally be more appealing for coaches as they appear willing to give coaches some time. City was hardly lights-out under Mancini for the first year and a half and still have problems. If Roman were their owner, they'd have gone through about 3 managers in that period.

I actually think we would have won in 04-05 even with Ranieri. People tend to forget that we finished second in 03-04 and then bought Ferriera, Cech, Robben, Drogba, and Carvalho. I really think that managers, once they reach a certain level of knowledge, are mostly fungible. The most important thing for me is that they have the ability to communicate their plan and what they want from their players be able to keep egos in check.

As well as only going after young players in transfers. Yes, we want to get that future core, but it's important to compete now and the players that are the best value are always older. You will almost never get value for a 22 year old but will often get great value for older players. (Berbatov 4.4M, Michu 2M, etc...) It's not all or nothing.We bought Carvalho when he was 26, Ballack when he was 30, Anelka when he was 29, etc...). It's like everything we do now has to be all one way. We go out and get all attacking players. We go out and get all young players and so on...

He didn't look five times better than Mikel. He had a very good run of games where he started 8 times in two months and he generally played quite well but people always exaggerated how good he was (as they will do with any new player), don't appreciate how small the sample size was, and ignore the fact that he's mostly been mediocre to bad since then . He is a young player with promise and deserves to get into games to see what he can do and I like him as the backup to Mikel, He's a good passer for a defensive midfielder, but his positioning is still pretty poor. I like him and think that he has a good future, but the people thinking he was a world-class player were always being ridiculous.

We improved enormously. Only lost one league game (away at Arsenal) after September and only five games in all competitions. It was an excellent season where we were unlucky not to win anything. We lost the FA Cup in extra time and the CL...well, we know what happened. I understand why people want to win trophies. We all do, but I'll take a season like that over a season like last year had we not won the CL. It's never JUST about winning trophies. I'd much rather have ManU's season last year than Liverpools' even though the latter won a trophy and the former didn't.

I agree. It's clearly the responsibility of the defensive midfielder to play through balls and to dissect the other teams' defence. I always said Makalele was crap. He barely ever scored.

He does provide cover, but a defensive midfielder can't be behind the defenders all the time trying to make sure they don't make any mistakes. He has a position to play. He's not a babysitter. You're basically blaming Mikel for others' mistakes and not crediting him at all when we play good defence.

No. Mikel has specific responsibilities and his job is to take care of those. Some of those responsibilities include covering for defenders but Mikel is not responsible for defenders having bad games. If Cahill doesn't close down a defender and if Luiz falls asleep, that's their problem.

So basically when we play well defensively he gets no credit and when we play poorly defensively, it's his fault?

Mikel has the most interceptions on the team and has the third most tackles. Not that that is a particularly great measure of how solid defensively he is. His positioning is fantastic and yes, he is strong on the ball. Right now, he is a much better player than Romeu whose positioning still needs a lot of work.

It depends what you mean. We were never going to win the league or the CL but we could finish top-4, get into the next round of the CL and maybe win one of the cups. I think the fast start gave people unrealistic expectations. We didn't the proper depth or balance in the squad from day one.

Fulham also concede the second most goals on the road. Going into today's match (and after) Chelsea at home: 14 goals for 7 against Fulham away: 12 goals for 16 against They've lost their last two matches to Sunderland and Stoke. This is not a top side. If they want to attack, great, we should be able to attack them better. This is not Barcelona or Bayern. This is a team that is significantly worse than us. There is no justification for negative tactics against Fulham.

What's the point?? Stopped the defensive rot? Why didn't Roman just ask RDM to do that? You can't ask for attacking football and then complain when you concede goals. We started off the season with 4 clean sheets in 5 matches but Roman wants attacking football...so, we played the players Roman wanted (and most people on here wanted) and we score more and conceded more..Basically, we're just going back to August? What was the point in firing Robbie if that's all we were going to do?

It was understandable if the attacking players on that side are Robben and Lahm and you are playing a vastly superior side and need to play defensively to win. Nobody was happy when Robbie played Bertrand this season as a winger and they shouldn't be happy when Rafa does it.

Voted for Cech because he did everything he had to do and made one excellent save. Nobody else was particularly good and most players were completely ineffectual. I don't even know who my second choice would be.

I agree. In the CL, he's been fantastic, in the PL, he's been mostly invisible. To be fair, he's young and coming from a very different league and it's not really fair to expect him to adjust immediately.