TorontoChelsea

I'm embarrassed to be a Chelsea supporter today. This has gotten ridiculous. Our manager won the CL and the FA Cup last season, our board sets him up with a team full of holes, we're still in third place in the league, and he gets fired? Are we going to fire managers every single time they have a bad stretch? Chelsea will seriously never be a consistent European powerhouse if we don't have stability in the manager position and we will never have stability in the manager position if managers keep getting sacked after a few poor games.

SAF changes tactics because he has the depth to do so. He has Van Persie, Javier Hernandez, Rooney, Kagawa, Nani, Welbeck, and Valencia for the attack. He can go wide or narrow. What options does RDM have? A 4-3-3? Well, if you look at positioning, we've actually played 4-3-3 a fair bit this season with Oscar dropping deep. We have a roster that has very little flexibility. We just don't have the depth. Anyway, had RDM started Torres we still would have lost and people would have blamed him for starting Torres.

How do we know? SAF is the best manager in Premier League history and it took him five years to win anything. RDM won the CL and FA Cup 6 months ago and people want him gone. Why isn't he the right type of manager for Chelsea? Because he isn't a big name? Do people really think that there are magic tactics out there that make players great and solve all our problems? Do people actually believe that if we had Pep Guardiola as our manager we'd be dominating? I'm sick of this "get rid of them" mentality every time something doesn't go our way. You know who would be a perfect manager for us? Carlo Ancelotti. He turned Pirlo into a world-class deep-lying midfielder with Milan. He had excellent experience and success in a variety of different leagues. But we sacked him. Why? Because our club thinks that every time a manager doesn't win something, they deserve to get fired. Is it possible for the club to ever have a bad streak without talk of a managerial change? I don't think so. It's ridiculous. Doesn't winning the CL buy more than a handful of games before the "he's not right" talk starts? Apparently not.

I think Wenger's quote is right on: ""We live in a world that is completely emotional. You have one defeat and you listen to people: they say 'get him out, get the player out, get the manager out'. Now they speak of Roberto Di Matteo. He's just won the Champions League and the FA Cup three months ago!"

A deserved loss. Not RDM's fault. There was no lineup or formation he could have used that would have got us the win. There was no substitution that was going to win the game for us. Juventus are simply a better side. Really sick of the hypocrisy of fans. RDM gets blamed for not changing the lineup. He changes. He gets blamed for that. You want us to develop our own players better? You want us to switch to a new, more exciting system? Those take years. You can't be mad when you have short-term problems. You mad at Chelsea wasting 50M pounds on a striker who was never going to fit into our system? Let's do that again with Falcao! The club is the place it's in because of short-term thinking. We've had 8 managers (7 really) in the last 5+ years. You don't have prolonged success when you keep blaming managers every time you go on a bad streak. The lack of patience is ridiculous. The blame for the current situation sits entirely with the board. Chelsea have spent more money than any other team in the last decade and almost none of it has been decent value. We keep chasing the sexy players that everyone else wants. We buy players at the peak of their value. We've spent something like 140M in the past 2 seasons and somehow we still have no true central midfielder for our system and we have mediocre central defenders, we have only one striker, and very little natural width. You can't just throw a bunch of players together and then complain when you don't win immediately.

It was a matter of time. Feel sorry for Cech. He's been fantastic and given up two goals on deflections.

That depends if Juventus also had a striker or not. We've missed a few chances, but so have they. Quite honestly, they deserve to be winning.

Ashley Cole is the one of the best goal-line clearance player in the world. He's done that so many times for us.

Odd lineup. A little skeptical because it involves putting a few players in positions they aren't used to which can be dangerous but very interested to see how it works, Would like to have seen Sturridge start.

I have always been dubious about "going for a draw". I think that except in extreme circumstances when you are massively less talented than the other side, you should play to win. Especially when you consider the way Chelsea want to play which is ball possession. Excellent ball possession works both as an attacking and defending tool. We don't really have a lot of choices in terms of starting XI. Maybe Sturridge at striker. Maybe Moses in. I really don't want to see Bertrand at midfield or a pivot of Mikel and Romeu. Either of those would signal going for a lesser starting XI for the sake of defence. Not worth it.

It's called overreaction based on a tiny sample size. It happens all the time on virtually every topic on here. It's as if many people don't understand that great players can have poor stretches and mediocre players can have excellent stretches and that what defines a player's ability is not a bad pass or a bad match or even bad month, it's his performance over the course of months and years.

It's ridiculous. I think people expect strikers to score on every decent chance they get. Even the best strikers in the world don't come close to that. Everybody misses chances. Sturridge was great today. He wasn't particularly wasteful either. He forced a couple of very good saves and he really only should have done better on the last chance of the game, but that happens. We had a lot of shots today, but they were almost all poor quality opportunities. The team is heavily imbalanced and lacks any depth. We all want rotation, but we don't have good enough players to rotate. You can't blame RDM for this. What was he supposed to do? Play Mata every single game? The Manchester clubs can have a plan B because they have the players for it. We don't.

Ugh...too bad. Well, I know better than to stay on this board after a loss.

It was a good shot by Sturridge, wrong footed, under pressure, going away from goal. It was just an excellent save. Myhill is playing very well.

Our attack is looking so dangerous right now...need to keep on pressing and something will click.

Sturridge's movement has been fantastic today.

The right substitutions...

1-1 half-time. Not a bad place to be at this point. We have a great bench and if the score stays the same by the 60th minute, we can make so big moves. We played much better after RDM moved Hazard to the left and Sturridge to the middle. Sturridge stays much further up which is what we need from the #10 and he had a good half with a couple of dangerous shots and some nice passing to boot. Azpilicueta and Bertrand both had a very good first half IMO but our central defence looks vulnerable.

Hazard!!!

Moses cross!!! We need more of that sort of thing. Action directly in their box with a chance to attack the ball.

We have the complete inability to get the ball to our attackers in dangerous areas. Our attackers are getting the ball way too wide or too deep to be able to do anything about it. The only way they'd be able to score is by running by a couple of defenders or having a fantastic shot from outside the area. Hazard is dropping off too deep and our central midfield is incapable of moving the ball with any authority.

Damn...

Moses and Sturridge have seemed to link up well in the brief time they've played together.

Two massive games coming up next week, RDM had no choice but to rest some players for this one. Not our best starting XI obviously, but we should still be able to get 3 points.

Worst signing? You've got to be kidding. He's almost certainly going to get 10-15 goals in the league for what 12M pounds?