TorontoChelsea

He heard you...what a pass to Torres!

Yeah. I wonder why no Mikel when he's going to get plenty of rest coming up. Maybe Rafa wants to have a look at Lamps/Ramires in the pivot as a possibility for league games.

Extremely unlikely but even if we did, probably not. Roman wants Guardiola and failing that some other long-term manager. Don't see Rafa being manager next season unless we play excellent football the rest of the year AND Roman is turned down by a few different managers.

Almost nil. I don't think Roman sees Benitez as a long-term manager (hence the short-term contract). We aren't going to win the CL or the league this year which would force Roman to re-consider Benitez and then wait to fire him after his first bad spell the next year. Roman will bring in a manager he wants in the summer.

I hope not. We're pretty far north so it's dark a lot in winter. @dionsa- Absolutely...mostly Americans though. You can tell people we ride to work with huskies pulling our sleds and lots of them would believe you.

The weirdest one about Australians is Fosters... an Australian beer that Australians never drink but everyone thinks they do. Many stereotypes have a grain of truth, many don't. There's a difference between a stereotype-say, thinking Canadians like hockey which we mostly do and just idiocy like thinking Canadians live in igloos (when a good 10% of us don't!) Stereotypes don't bother me. Idiocy does.

It's not even a tournament really. The only two teams with a chance to win both only play one game and then each other. It's huge in Brazil because it's the only game they get to face a European club. European clubs don't treat it as a joke, but they also don't treat it the same way.

Many Americans have a religious view of the constitution. As if the founding fathers were prophets rather than smart but flawed men. (And all of them were white men). There is no need for anyone to have an assault rifle. There is no need for people to walk around with concealed weapons. It's madness. @communicate-absolutely. The media is so complicit in this nonsense. The discussion is almost always "how can this happen" in a moral sense and they focus on mental illness (the lack of public funding for this also doesn't help). That's not the real issue. You can never stop people from snapping and wanting to kill lots of people. You can, however, stop people from getting guns so that when they do snap, their ability to commit violence is severely limited.

We never could have won the CL and finished top-4. Had we been knocked out by Napoli, we'd have had a shot, but after that, we started resting all our key players. Mata, Lampard, Mikel, Cole, etc...barely played in the league for the last couple of months.

Guns are a lot easier to control than drugs. People can make drugs in their backyard or in their kitchen. Do you know people who grow their own weed? I do. Making a gun and bullets is extremely difficult. You need them to be manufactured The US will never ban guns, but the easy access of people to guns IS the problem. They just don't want to admit it. I hate how the media covers this stuff. It's always "victims and heroes", personal interest stories, rather than any serious discussion as to why this happens so frequently in the US. The distance from Toronto to the States is about 100 miles, but sometimes it feels like we're oceans apart.

Not to mention that we only made a profit because of accounting trickery last season. They claimed a profit of 28.8 M in transfers but that is only due to staggering the payments. They actually spent more money on players than they received which means that Chelsea will be paying significant money for transfers from last season for a few years yet. It's impossible to tell how much Chelsea will lose because we don't know how much they'll spend yet. It could be a 30-40M loss or, if we spend big, it could be up there with City's losses.

Would love him but...we're going to lose a lot of money this year (no C.L., high transfer costs already, amortization of past transfers, etc...) and you can get cheaper good players at LB than you can at our other need positions (striker or two, central midfield). We got Azpilecueta for 7M pounds. Jordi Alba cost about the same for Barca. The other thing to consider is that with Lampard, Cole, and Sturridge all looking likely to leave, Chelsea are going to be able to buy almost exclusively British players.I don't think Chelsea will ever hand the job over to Bertrand straight out, but they could do something like buying Luke Shaw and letting the two of them compete. And just for fun, here is a whoscored.com article on some interesting young fullbacks. http://www.whoscored.com/Blog/yp0yhnuaceyeyvy7jtiviw/Show/Hot-Prospect-Scout-Five-Top-Young-Full-Backs

Agree. Just saying that I think he's more an emergency fill-in than a solution to anything. We do need an emergency fill-in though.

All of us have different opinions on different players and what would be best for Chelsea, but CELEBRATING the possible departure of one of the greatest Chelsea players ever is shocking for anyone claiming to be a Chelsea supporter. Even those supporters who believe it is best for Lampard to move on, do so with a heavy heart not with flag waving and cheering.

I hope not. Our best players should be starting 45-50 games in all competitions. We have 22 more league games to go. Hazard has already started 33 games. Even if he only plays in the Premier League, he'd have started 55 matches. Mata would be at 49. That's without international matches, UEFA Cup, or any FA Cup or League Cup games (or the game against Corinthians next week). It's just not possible to play these guys this much without it hurting us down the line in one way or another (exhaustion, injury, or needing to rest players in key league matches) This is why I was quite surprised at the team selection for the game. I thought players like Bertrand and Marin could have started with very little chance of Chelsea losing and it would be a good opportunity to give them some playing time and rest some guys. You want a strong side against Leeds? Fine, that's 3 games in 6 days right before we have 4 league games in about 10 days. Our starters will have to sit out at least one, maybe two of those games otherwise they'd be playing 8 matches in a little over 3 weeks (not to mention the long and tiring trip to and from Japan).

I thought he was better than average but...my worry with him in midfield is positioning (the same problems he has at defence) and while I think he's fine in the midfield for teams like Leeds and Norwich and so on, do you want him marking players like Silva or Cazorla or Rooney? His lack of positional awareness/tendency to fall asleep will be a problem anywhere he plays.

Good piece. Generally, I thought Oscar was quite poor in the pivot but as I said elsewhere, it's not fair to judge him on one performance especially one where he isn't playing with a DM. Oscar and Ramires are both similar defenders in that they both press a lot, both ball chase too much, and are both aggressive in tackling. You need to have one player who is more positionally aware, is less aggressive, and doesn't go forward much.

It doesn't really make sense to buy any defensive midfielder in January unless he's very cheap. We're talking about spending millions of pounds on a player just to play for a handful of games while Mikel and Romeu are gone. (And that's if we make the buy as soon as the window opens) Then what? We have a third choice DM? Much better to just go without for a few games and spend the money on long-term needs.

Brazil are actually ranked 13th in the world now by FIFA. They have a top side of course and could well win the World Cup at home, but people are too in awe of them based on results from a decade ago. This isn't a team filled with world class players. (In comparison, the 2002 team had Ronaldo, Kaka, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Cafu, etc...) This team has a few top players and a lot of players with potential. Making national teams is difficult or easy based on the depth at a particular position rather, they style the coach wants to play, and so on, rather than an entire squad. (Take Spain-impossible to make it as an attacking midfielder, but any on-form striker at a big club would get an immediate call-up.) Anyway, it doesn't really matter because none of our Brazilians are remotely close to being top-10 in their position in the world which was my point. Mikel is definitely one of the best pure defensive midfielders in the Premier League, we don't have a lot of other players at the same level of their positions.

Maybe you could make a case for Cole and Cech as top-10 at their positions, but that's about it. Mikel is not the best defensive midfielder in the world, but he's actually closer to elite than what we have at a lot of positions. We could improve at DM just like we could improve virtually everywhere, but people are generally too hard on Mikel. Some of the criticisms are legitimate (for example, I think he can speed up his decision making sometimes), but some of them are a lack of understanding of what a defensive midfielder is supposed to do. His job is one of the least sexy jobs on the pitch. It's about positioning, safety, cover, and so on. Wanting a dynamic player to come in and play the position won't work. You need am unexciting, smart player there. The bottom line for me is that we can be elite with Mikel as our defensive midfielder (we were) but we have a number of positions where I don't think we can win if we don't improve (Ramires as deep-lying midfielder, Luiz/Cahill at CB, need long-term striker, etc...).

Calling it "football" is fine where you can, but it just doesn't work over here because the NFL is the most popular sport so if you say "did you watch football yesterday?" or something, 100% of people will assume you mean American football. It just would never work to call it anything other than soccer. (And this is even among my friends who are Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian, etc...they all still say "soccer") I can actually use another example from your previous sentence of why this happens. Nobody in North America calls it "Ice Hockey" because the word "ice" is only used to differentiate it from what we call "field hockey". We just call it hockey because here, field hockey is a sport for girls in high school so nobody really talks about it. It doesn't bother me if someone else calls hockey "ice hockey" at all though. Language is fluid and adapts to different cultures and circumstances.

Yeah, I agree. Kagawa is an excellent player, but he's been hurt and when healthy was asked to move around to pitch to accommodate the different styles ManU play. (Trying to fit an attacking midfielder into the triangle of strikers is difficult). I would take him in a second. He doesn't have the upside Hazard has though whose ceiling is as high as anyone's.

"Soccer" is an English usage starting in the 19th century for association football and not an Americanism. Many English-speaking countries actually use the term "soccer" usually to differentiate it from other sports (American Football, Aussie Football, Gaelic football). Using the term "soccer" is certainly is not a sign of a lack of knowledge or appreciation of the sport.

Away games are more difficult and you have to put the effort in to win every single match, but the schedule is very easy. It's just a really imbalanced schedule for us this year.

In a sense you're right-there are no easy games in the Premier League and so on, but the truth is that some games are easier than others so easy is a relative term. Facing QPR is easier than facing ManU and facing Nordjsalland is easier than facing Juventus. It doesn't mean that you can treat any game as a joke.. After the Man City Game, we played/play (brackets=current league standings) Fulham(13), West Ham (10), Nordsjaelland (maybe worst side in the CL, missing their best players), Sunderland (18), 2 teams we should beat in Japan, Southampton (15), Leeds (Championship side), Villa (16), Norwich (11), Everton (5), QPR (20), Southampton-FA Cup (15). That's a 13 game stretch where we face one very tough game (Everton away). That is insanely easy relative to a normal schedule and just hi-lights the difficult stretch we had early in the year and we will have again come February and again April. In comparison, the last 13 games RDM managed us, we faced Juventus away, Shakhtar twice, Arsenal and Spurs away, WBA away, Swansea away, and ManU twice.