TorontoChelsea

Would have liked a second goal but we dominated that half. It looks like West Ham are down to 9 men. The gap in talent is obvious.

What a save!

Dangerous...

Wow...some fantastic play from Azpi, Hazard, and then Moses. Mata should have scored.

Agreed. He does what he does. He counters well, is very fast, plays aggressive defence in the centre of the pitch, but is always going to be poor at providing that final ball or seeing the field with excellent vision.

We're beating them to every ball. It's like we have an extra 2 players on the pitch. Really only worried about set pieces against right now.

Yes!

Ugh Ramires, you can't lose your man like that.

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)

Watched the first 20 seconds. Absolute garbage and couldn't keep watching. When people say "Jews flourished in the Arab world" (or similar claims about how Jews always had it good in Muslim countries) they clearly have no idea what they are talking about and are interested in getting across an agenda rather than in historical research. Jews were severely persecuted in Muslim countries. It was generally better than it was in Europe, but losing 7-0 is better than losing 11-0. It doesn't make it good. Jews living in Arab countries were confined to ghettos, persecuted, and not infrequently massacred. Of course, this is so symptomatic of the entire conflict-to portray one side as evil rejectionists and the others as innocent, peace-loving victims. The conflict is incredibly complex and everyone there's been more than enough idiocy and blame to go around. Were the Palestinians supposed to accept Jews taking their land? No, of course not. Nobody would say "hey come take m land because you have a historical connection to it". Was Israeli's creation some historically awful event that means that Israel's right to exist needs to be constantly questioned? Obviously not. The creation of basically every country in the world was worse than Israel's. Almost all of South and North America were created on the back of genocide (and their native populations still live in much worse conditions) and nobody says they have no right to exist..Are settlements justified because of some biblical passages or something? Of course not. They are illegal, immoral and indefensible. Can you rationally deny Jewish connection to Israel? No, you can't. Connection to Israel is so blindingly inherent in Judaism that deny is either complete ignorance of Judaism or lunacy. Yet, in a handful of posts, you basically see all of this. I'm so sick of this shit. No other conflict do people think they know so much and actually know so little.

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.