TorontoChelsea

We deserved that. Been taking the game to them for a while.

Wow, this is set up for a brilliant second half.

What a free kick. Boy, Mata is carrying us offensively recently.

This is why possession is so overrated. We have 58% of the possession but it's just passing it around the middle of the pitch posing no danger whatsoever. ManU are counter-attacking and are much more dangerous.

Worst time is before an international break because you have that bitter taste on your tongue for 2 weeks. Saturday early game is the worst for a time slot because I have to get up at 7:45 to watch them play those and if they lose, I get the "should have just slept in" feeling.

12 added minutes. Wow. Would generally always like to see more extra time than is given and this 12 is deserved because of the injuries, but I can't remember ever seeing this much extra time given.

I think it depends on what Chelsea want to do with Oscar. They seemed to suggest earlier that they were going to move him into central midfield. If that's the case, Chelsea don't need to upgrade there but they would need to buy a winger if Marin and Moses don't show enough.Also, your suggestions mean another 80-100M pounds in spending or so. Don't think this is going to happen unless Chelsea win the CL again.

Poor Julio Cesar. A couple of fantastic saves but QPR couldn't hold Arsenal.

Andre Santos is one of the worst defensive left backs I've ever seen. Every time an attacker goes at him, they seem to be able t just run past him with ease.

Hate the name and refuse to use it or any other abbreviation. Why do players need a nickname? Did we call Terry, Lampard, and Drogba DROMPRY or something?And they played together for years, not a handful of games. It reminds me of being in grade school and trying to come up with a cool nickname for our group of kids. Mata, Hazard, and Oscar are three players with different skills, who bring different things to the game, and who will have different futures. Why is there a need to try to combine them into one entity?

So Mikel can score!!

Hard to know what to make of this. I don't know why the FA don't set up a pay site. My friend lives in Australia and bought NFL Pass and MLB Extra innings and can watch every single game live streaming (alternatively, you can just buy every game your team plays which costs less money, monthly packages or even one game). If the Premier League did the same, I'd buy the package in a second.

The first half of last year he looked like he was declining (but didn't most of our team under AVB?) and you are right. He's been a beast this year.

I am extremely sure. On the scale of big tournaments, the CL is a 10 and the CWC is a 2. It's like saying "players want to win the Premier League so they get a better draw in the Capital One Cup" . In Brazil, it's bigger, but it's still not close to the Champion's League. Neymar wanted to play in the tournament because his club was going to play in it but his decision to stay in Brazil was not because of the CWC otherwise he would have gone this summer. He wants to stay until after the World Cup in 2014 which will be in Brazil and he's made that clear several times as has Santos.

It's not really even a tournament. For the only two good clubs in the tournament, it's a maximum of two games played. Barcelona used a weaker team for their first game last season. If you look at Barca's "average starting XI" (players who played most frequently), only five of them started in their first game. No Xavi, no Fabergas, no Busquets, no Pique, no Alexis, no Danny Alves. In the second game, they used a full-strength team. I think that's what we will do too. Rest some key players and have most players only start one game. Also, I don't think any player thinks "I want to win the CL so I can get to play in the CWC.".

Welcome!

I see what you mean. Their shape does go off because Rooney often has to drift a fair bit. He himself does get back to defend, but they have to do something to fix their defensive problems (besides hope for Vidic to come back healthy). There definitely should be space for both teams to exploit and there will be a lot of firepower on the pitch. Really looking forward to the match.

Agreed. And don't think his choices have anything to do with balls.."He plays who he wants, he plays who he wants, RDM, he plays who he wants" or something like that. He's conservative as a coach but it's not because he's too scared or anything. ,Sturridge will definitely start the second ManU game and I think if he has a good one (or if he plays well as a sub in the first game) he'll earn more of RDM's trust and start to get starts in the league..

The Diamond is working very well. ManU have been scoring a lot of goals. Rooney and RVP have basically played 4.5 games together and ManU have scored 14 goals in that time. Their problems have been defensive and more to do with lack of talent at certain spots than anything else. .

.And Eddie Newton. How many assistant managers are minorities on other clubs? Chelsea's multiculturalism was one of the reasons I loved them in my first years of fandom. Most other clubs were basically just slow British players who liked to lob the ball up the field and hoped to get a head on it. We had Zola and Desailly and Poyet and Babayaro (in fact, Chelsea have been one of the best clubs at bringing African players over as well. We've had Essien, Mikel, Drogba, ) It bothers me when people try to act as if we're a racist club (like say, half the teams in some parts of the continent or Leeds.)

Yeah, ManU are a very different team and my concern with them is different. Rooney and RVP are playing really well together and with Hernandez or Welbeck, they form a very dangerous triangle and Nani, Valencia, and Kagawa (who might not play due to injury) also can be dangerous in attack and they along with their fullbacks, can create some width. Their defence and central midfield are suspect so I think our passing and skill moves could work to good effect to expose them. Here's a couple of stats that shows the difference in styles: Total accurate crosses. Chelsea: 28, ManU: 49. Total Successful Dribbles: Chelsea: 62, ManU: 44

AVB for 13.3M? Got half a crappy season out of him. I would have done that for much less. (say 9.4 million) Torres is certainly one of the worst. ManU had a couple of awful ones. Veron for close to 30M was a bust. Anderson was over 20M. He's still around but it's been five crappy years.

Assou-Ekotto and Parker would also be starters if healthy. And not having Terry for one game is not really a loss. Terry, Luiz, and Cahill are all around the same ability and rotate anyway. I also think that people don't appreciate how teams game-plan. I am sure the Spurs were planning their attack (as they always do) around Bale. With a coach like AVB, that means tons of plays and diagrams drawn up. We were all thinking about how they were going to use their width to try to counter our narrow midfield and I am sure they would have.To have that go up in smoke minutes before a game starts has a major impact. Having more shots does not necessarily equal having more chances to score, but Spurs did create more chances to score as well. A team can get 15 shots and another 9 and have more chances, but Spurs had 26 shots. That means that they were getting the ball in dangerous areas a hell of a lot. They weren't taking shots from 50 yards out. We did deserve to win because we limited our mistakes and were more ruthless in finishing. "we completely dominated the game" is just nonsense.

First of all, Spurs were down four starters including probably their two best players and their key player was lost at the last moment which meant that the teams' entire tactics were thrown out the window (can just imagine what that did to a tactical coach like AVB). That Spurs team was mid-table quality and with no preparation Second of all, we didn't dominate them at all. Spurs definitely had more opportunities to score than we did. It wasn't just that small window. Sigurdsson alone had about 4 decent chances to score but luckily for us, he's not Bale and he can't finish. We kept letting their midfielders into dangerous spots right outside the box unmolested. Even late in the game when we should have been feverishly protecting a 3-2 lead, we let Spurs have way too many chances. The ball falls a little better to Adebayor or he's a little sharper, he scores in the 90th minute. Lennon and Walker both had dangerous shots from just outside the box that were saved in the 85-90 minute period and they were allowed to just run the ball up for those shots. You can't dominate a team and be outshot 26-10. We won because Mata was brilliant and Walker and Gallas were atrocious.Luckily, we have Mata and they have Gallas and Walker so we deserved to win, but it was not some fantastic performance by any stretch of the imagination and it was a harbinger to the problems we had against Shakhtar. And yes, you can attack and defend at the same time. It's not one or the other. We don't need to play a defensive formation, but our attacking players have to be more responsible in their defensive duties. You can't have prolonged success if your attacking players aren't helping out at all on the defensive end.

Right now, we have a very imbalanced squad. We lack width, we lack a deep-lying midfielder, we lack defensive discipline. What we have is an incredibly talented team and a coach who is a quick learner so that will win us a lot of games but, we do need tinkering. The parts we have don't really seem to fit. It's the same old story of lack of coaching continuity and input on transfers. For example, there is no style of play or formation that will suite a player like Mata (who is fantastic in the style we play now but was almost useless when we played the defensive counter-attack in the CL last season) and also suite a player like Ramires (who was awesome in those CL contests but is not a ball possession type of player on either side of the ball-he isn't a very good passer and is too aggressive a tackler for the system). I don't want to come off as whining or anything because we are definitely on the right path and are off to a fantastic start, but I also think that positive results have blinded some people to some real flaws that need to be fixed. Because we beat Arsenal and Spurs, people act as if we dominated them. We didn't. We were out-shot 42-20 in those two matches. (We've given up 49 shots in our last two matches) That's just not a ratio you can keep up and expect sustained success even with a goalie as awesome as Cech.