TorontoChelsea

Yeah, there's almost always a "new manager bounce" where everyone says "see how much better he is, I told you we should have fired the last guy". Then, after 2 months, you're back at exactly the same level.

I agree somewhat with this. I think most managers can win with good teams. Nobody thinks Grant was a particularly good manager, but Chelsea were fantastic under him and we were unlucky not to win the CL. RDM was not regarded particularly highly as a manager, but we won the CL with him. Where managers can make a big difference is negatively. If a manager can't communicate with players either personally or with his tactics, the team will suffer. Overall though, if you get a manager who can communicate properly and knows his football, I don't think it matters all that much which manager you choose. Any manager would do well at Barca and every manager will do poorly with Reading.

In a way, yes because I think expectations for Guardiola would be insane. No new manager would be able to come in and suddenly turn Chelsea into the Premier League champions or something.I don't think who the manager is matters much, Chelsea just need to find someone, let that person have a greater say in transfer policy, and actually stick with him for at least a few years even if that means accepting disappointing results.

Agree broadly with this. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100190878/it-makes-almost-literally-no-difference-who-replaces-roberto-di-matteo-as-chelseas-manager/ Managers don't make that much of a difference. Talent makes a massive difference. It's for this reason that firing and hiring managers all the time makes no sense. It doesn't actually change the results long-term. One thing managers can do is bring a sense of command to the club. No Chelsea manager can have that right now because their positions are far too tenuous. Mancini could banish Tevez. Ferguson and Wenger can sit anyone they want. Players now that every manager we bring in is just 4 or 5 bad games away from getting fired. Why listen to what he says?

I'd actually prefer Grant to Benitez for a short-term manager. Benitez would have designs on trying to make the job his own. I don't see that with Grant. If it's a temporary manager, I don't see why they didn't just give RDM more time though.

No one can and that's not the manager's fault. If you have a manager for 10 years, even the best manager in the world, they are going to have 2 or 3 down years. This isn't Spain where there basically two teams who win everything. In lEngland, the best teams have years where they win nothing. ManU have been the best team in the Premier League era. They won nothing last year. They only won the league cup in 09-10 and 05-06. They won nothing in 04-05, etc...Should they have fired Ferguson after every down year? If it were Roman running ManU, SAF would have been fired in 03-04. As I wrote earlier, Roman has fired four managers a year after they came in second in the Premier League. That's crazy. The expectations on Chelsea managers are absurd and the only way any manager will take the job is with the mindset "I'll make a ton of money out of this no matter what and hopefully stay a year or two" because no sane human being would take a job with a boss whose expectations are that insane..

Based on what? The rebuilding job is the task of the board. They generally decide who to buy and who not to at Chelsea. Ancelotti didn't waste 75M pounds or so on Torres and Luiz. Managers at Chelsea have much less input in decision making that they do on other clubs and THAT is one of the big problems. As for letting teams stagnate? What the hell does that even mean? It means his teams had success and then didn't have success? His teams didn't get better? That's the same with every manager. You could say that Guardiola let his team stagnate. Barcelona got worse last year. They didn't develop. Ancelotti won the CL with Milan in 03 and 07. He won Seria A in 04. That's a pretty nice period of sustained success. And the 25-26 ages? That's nonsense and it's baffling... and I don't know where it comes from. Ancelotti worked wonders with Rui Costa, Maldini, Inzaghi with Rivaldo and all sorts of other older players. He helped develop Kaka into one of the best players in the world. Pato played brilliantly under him when he was very young. He's a very good manager. I'm amazed at some of the criticisms mangers get leveled at them.

How did sacking Carlo work out to be the correct decision? He's an excellent manager who did very well with us and I'd be happy if he were still at Chelsea. He never deserved to be sacked. We'd be in a better position if he were still with us. And how can you give him credit for firing AVB and not blame him for spending millions to get him a few months earlier? I don't trust Roman not because I think he's trying to screw the club, but because he acts like a spoiled fan on a message board and not like a serious football executive. We're going to have our fourth manager since May 2011. That's insane. I don't know how anyone could trust Roman with managers. He's been great for supplying Chelsea with money and horrible in dealing with managers.

I hope not. We need a long-term manager for the future not of the past. Going back with Mourinho would be like getting back with your ex from 5 years ago. It seems like a good idea at the time because you haven't been in a good relationships for a while and you remember all the good times (and you've had one drink too many), but once you get back together, you realise things have changed and it just isn't the same anymore. And besides, Chelsea are building the anti-Mourinho team. Jose likes defensive solidity, physicality and a strong counter-attack. Players like Carvalho, Terry, Lampard, Essien, Ballack, Makalele, and Drogba...Strength, positioning, work-rate...You really think that players like Mata, Oscar, and Hazard, the players we're building around would fit into that system? I think Mourinho would murder David Luiz.

I think a lot of people will be. There's a lot of justified outrage over this sacking. Here's a list of what some of our managers have done for us the year before being sacked by Roman (Not inlcuding Scolari and AVB who were the two managers fired due to truly awful results) Ranieri-2nd in the league, CL semi-final Mourinho-Winners in the FA Cup and League Cup, 2nd in the league, CL semi-final Grant-2nd in the league, CL finalists, League Cup finalists, 6th round FA Cup Ancelotti-2nd in the league, quarter finals in the CL RDM-CL and FA Cup winner, 6th in the league. Roman has fired 4 mangers less than a season after they finished 2nd in the league. He fired three managers who managed to finish both second in the league and reach, at least, the CL semi-finals. And now, he's fired a manager who won the CL with a team that had no business being there. This carousel is insane and it has to stop.

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.

This is actually true of pretty much all wars in the past 50 years and was perhaps true of most wars in history. War has become completely asymmetrical in virtually every way. It's no longer fought on battlefields between two relatively even fighting forces and hasn't been for a long time (probably since the Korean War). I'm pretty sick of the Palestinian-Israeli wars. Until both sides respect each others' right to exist, there simply will be no peace. It's a political conflict that both sides think that they can win militarily and they can't. It's amazing to me to continue to see people act as if they're just about to win or that the tide is turning so that they are close to achieving their goals (which are generally destruction of "the other"). It's not going to happen. The other side is not going to give up and thinking that they will is just ridiculous. They also both need to stop looking at the past and look to the future. If everyone in the world were obsessed about the past, there'd be unending wars in every single country. At some point, people have to care more about the future than the past. Also, the outside influences in the dispute are poisonous. If both sides got the support for peace that they get for war, there'd have been peace long ago.

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.

I have a friend who's writing a book on how social media changes social behaviour. It's really crazy. How important are you really that you need to be checking your messages every 20 seconds? Are you a doctor on call or are you hoping that someone "liked" your facebook status update. We all have gotten too attached to our phones, We are all scared that we're going to miss something. Hence, those ridiculous ads that try to compete to show which service is the fastest, as if getting that text .03264 seconds earlier matters. I was at a friend's cottage (Canadian term for a small house in the wilderness) and we had no access to any network for days. It was so freeing.

I set myself a goal a few years ago-Two places I never wanted to set foot in: Hospitals and night clubs. I've always told my girlfriends that they can go clubbing with their friends, but I'm not going. I hate the music, I don't like dancing, I don't want to spend money on overpriced drinks, the noise is deafening, and I hate the atmosphere. When I go out, I like to go to places where I can you know...converse with people.

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.