The only place to be

Could Bertrand be world-class? He's 23 years old, played in 200 league games and has 2 England caps and I'm still not sure. Shaw on the other hand looks special at 17.

That he was disrespected by Arsenal and turned-on by their fans. It's pretty well-known there's no love lost between him and his former club. Have you ever read his twitter comments? https://twitter.com/TheRealAC3/status/227076381182406656

From what I've heard and seen at the club.

I've said that Lamps should get a new contract if Mourinho becomes manager. But we still need to replace him in the first team so I'm then arguing in favour of a bench player being given at least £80k a week (at a guess), which is against my frugal nature. I like the idea of Frank sticking around because I enjoy seeing him at the club and would hate seeing him at another. In footballing terms though, I don't know if he's needed. I can't stand Torres, but he was a £50million investment (probably double that with wages) and you can't just write them off. The fans didn't write him off either, up until last month (the Sunderland game was the last false dawn) so the board weren't alone in that. We knew how much he cost and that we needed him to succeed. I'm sure people on here were saying after Didier left that he would shine, I know I did. I think with the hiring of AVB the club showed a willingness to embrace stability and promote young players, but that didn't work out and we all have our theories why. But the willingness and the investment in youth is enough for me to believe that the club does want to do things the right way and until I believe differently I won't be joining in the calls of 'sack the board'.

If you want an atmosphere like Anfield, go to Anfield. Yes they finished above us in one season. They've had eight years without a trophy though, and they've sold their best player on at least two occasions. They have three players out on loan who could be part of the first team - we have Lukaku, De Bruyne, Courtois, Kalas, Chalobah and Omeruo who I expect to be part of the first-team. We haven't done well in bringing players through in the past but I expect that to change much like our transfer policy has. If you think Oxlade-Chamberlain has had a good season, then you either don't watch Arsenal or don't know many Arsenal fans. He's had a poor season and a lot of fans are blaming Wenger for that. Gibbs is a decent left-back but no better than Bertrand. In fact I'd hazard a guess Oscar has score more Champions League goals than those players have Champions League starts. The last paragraph is bollocks. Ashley loves Chelsea and doesn't tend to talk in glowing terms about the Arsenal fans who labelled him Cashley.

I'm not the one who said the guy who wrote the piece had 'nailed it'. You're the one who did that and you've been walking it back ever since. My view on Roman is that he's made plenty of mistakes, but that he's human and that he's been trying to run this club properly in recent years. Still, the signings of Torres (for which Carlo gets a free pass but others don't) and the hiring of Benitez (who I defended at the time because he seemed like the best option) were indefensible in hindsight. But I made a point to put them into context with the other things we do. I look at the Lukaku and Courtois signings and think we're replacing key players. I look at the performance of our youth team and think we're doing exactly the right thing in the academy. I look at the signings of Azpi, Ba and Moses and think we're finally moving away from the high-priced 30 year olds we used to sign. I look at the continuing moves to secure a bigger stadium and think this is a guy in it for the long-haul. I look at the contracts we've offered to players like Mata and Cahill and think we're finally looking to balance the books. Right now, we're in about as bad a spot as we've been for years. But I truly think we have something very special coming together that will start with the appointment of the right manager. Until I don't think that then I'm not going to call for heads to roll because I personally see no reason to. And I'm going to continue to read things through and compare them with my own thoughts and feelings before I say someone's 'nailed-it'.

I love how you accuse Roman of being out of touch, and then say we should be more like Arsenal. :lol2: :lol2: So you want the atmosphere of Liverpool (no league title in how many decades), the resourcefulness of Arsenal (selling your best resources and not replacing them is resourceful?), the pride of Bayern (can't argue with that) and the stability of Barca (that stability followed a lot of instability). Is there anything about Chelsea that you like? As for a plan, we do have one. For the first-time in a while it's a long-term plan based on bringing through young players. We weren't doing that even a few years ago, and it's not surprising because Roman's investment in youth is less than a decade old so now is about the time you'd expect them to start coming through. Going back to the Arsenal point though, they don't bring through much youth now. They're success this season (such that it is) is based as much on expensive signings who are about 27 than it is youth products. You're talking about Arsenal from about five years ago aren't you?

I've called you on this before, but we have a chance to beat United. And we have Ba up front.

He's a guy running a business. Show me one person who doesn't make mistakes in the first ten years? And he probably did the right things to get us to the level where we could win titles, but it's shifting from a business based on outside investment to one that can be self-sustaining that is tricky and that's where we've fallen down. There are so many positive signs though with the signings we've made and the performance of our young kids (our future) that people need to take a long-term view of things rather than simply calling for 'the board' to be sacked without being able to explain why. The main thing needs to be sorting out the managerial situation.

Come on. You're trying so hard to excuse Roman when even he would say the buck stops with him. You call these people sycophantic scroungers, but HE HIRED THEM. If you think he's such an insecure billionaire (because there are so many of them) then why would his next hirings be any different?

Exactly. The thing is, when I see Roman in his box I see a guy who genuinely enjoys owning a football club. That doesn't mean he hasn't made mistakes but I genuinely think we're heading in the right direction and that we'll achieve success built on sustainable grounds. But I expect more articles like the one in the OP if we fail to get into next season's Champions League.

Well he's a tactical moron as well, but all managers are aren't they?

He should be given a chance but they shouldn't? Some opposition fans might say that we're too cowardly to call out our owner because we realise how much we rely on his money. I'm sure that's not the case and I'm sure that you're not just calling for the board's heads because they're an easy target. But let's look at who exactly we should sack and who we should get in. The first team is a mess because of mistakes made by people in charge around 2008 in my opinion. Now that includes Mr 'Silver Bullet' himself, Peter Kenyon yet the author of that piece seems to think he's the right choice to bring back. Is he on the money in that regard? If you look at the most contentious issues in the last few years, the purchasing of Torres, the sacking of AVB, the sacking of RDM, the hiring of Benitez, doesn't the buck ultimately stop with Roman? Blaming the people you think are nothing but yes men WHO WERE HIRED BY ROMAN seems to be a kneejerk reaction specifically designed to avoid upsetting our owner. Why not go the whole hog? Let's just sack the yes men and hire another group of people who definitely won't be yes men. But how does Roman hire these people? Oh right, by consulting with another group of yes men because he sounds like a frightfully insecure person. Or we can look at what we have at the top of the club and try and look at what they're doing with a sense of perspective. Have they made mistakes? Absolutely. Are there key areas where they've fucked up? Yes. Is the club on the whole moving in the right direction? I think we are. I think we're suffering from mistakes made half a decade ago and there's no quick-fixes for them.

The old 'people don't understand Mikel's role' stuff. It's patronising bullshit when you realise that every Chelsea fan loved Claude Makelele. Fellaini is a DM playing in an advanced role with sound technical skills. His positioning as a DM was perfectly good. We can have this argument again but you don't want to discuss what he was like when he was a DM at Everton and Liege, so let's leave it. Mikel's problem is that he's an average DM and that's not a bad thing in itself. But when a sportsman is average then 50% of people will say he's underrated and the other 50% will say he's overrated. He doesn't make the team worse but he doesn't make it better. He's a shirt-filler who has been lucky to have played in some good teams, but he'll never stand out on his own merits. Now it didn't have to be that way. He was a stand-out player as a more creative midfielder but was converted to a DM by Jose. I hate that. I hate trying to make a more offensive-minded player into a defensive-force because they require different things. It's why I favour Chalobah as a DM (to go back to that point). His first instinct will always be to defend. It's why I don't think the most urgent thing we face is replacing Mikel. He can be in the team, but that team has to be much better because he won't elevate a single player's performance. He'll occasionally fuck-up but most of the time the other players will cover for him. And when all else fails, there will be fans like you to tell supporters they're too stupid to understand just how good Mikel is.

You said the author of that piece nailed it and you said the problems at this club run deep. Why wouldn't you be calling for his head?

So you think Roman should go then?

You could make a case for Fellaini, Toure, maybe Lucas but there is a real dearth of strong defensive midfielders right now in this league. It's why it's a good idea for you to put him in context with the current crop and not compare him to the player we all enjoyed watching just a few years ago - Makelele. Maybe that's why he's struggled to convince the supporters who loved Claude, because they have such fond memories of watching him dominate midfields. I think Mikel will be a capable backup player for this club going forward, but after 250+ games for the club I still don't see him an an integral player for us. Every time I see him coming out for the Blues, I think we could do better. I actually think we should seriously look at making Chalobah a DM because he could thrive there for both club and country for the next decade, and I'd start that process ASAP.

No, not like Liverpool. Their problems were and are much worse than our's. Missing out on the CL for one season might not be the worst thing in the world. Going by league form last season, we should've missed out. Maybe this is the wake-up call we need.

I think it's a piss-poor piece of prose if I'm being honest. You can't take a subject like Roman's reign as owner and fail to acknowledge what is being built for the future. If you don't want to give a judgment on that then don't choose a pun-laden title like 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire'. If you must persist with that then you have to acknowledge that Rome wasn't built in a day, but our own Roman tried very hard to do that and suffered the inevitable failure less than a decade later. What's reassuring about him is that he's shown signs of trying to rectify his mistakes which is why there is hope for the future. The narrative of Chelsea doesn't begin in 2003 and end in 2013. Also, calling Roman a devil and then asking him to leave so invariably leads to the old idiom of 'better the devil you know' that one can't fail to notice the lack of self-awareness of the author. Like I said I can understand where he's coming from but the conclusions he reaches are so clueless that they have little real value. It's at best a hit piece, if it wasn't so poorly researched.

That sounds like we'd have to give a manager time because there wouldn't be an easy replacement, we'd have to give the young players a chance because we couldn't sign the Falcaos of this world and I completely disagree with the last bit. Missing the UCL might give us a chance to build this club properly rather than signing 30 year olds on big contracts as a short-cut to success.

So farce and Champions League football is preferable? We need to remove the farce altogether and a lack of CL football might enable us to rebuild under slightly less pressure. We need to be a bit honest about ourselves and admit we didn't build this club from the bottom up - we tried to build without solid foundations and then when the walls started crumbling we simply tried to paper over the cracks. Now we're doing the right thing with the academy and transfer dealings, but there's a gap between what we've got at the moment and what we'll have in the future which is a breeding ground for turmoil. In retrospect this clusterfuck was somewhat inevitable.

Last week our youth team beat Barca's 2-0 away. Lukaku scored two goals and looked every inch the beat we thought we'd signed. Courtois is arguably the top young goalkeeper in world football. De Bruyne looked comfortable against the team we faced in last season's CL Final (which we won btw). Chalobah continues to impress at Watford. Hazard, Oscar and Mata are three of the most skillful players we've ever had. Now I understand why the author of that piece might feel the way he does, but it is a kneejerk reaction and nothing more. Football supporters tend to live in the moment because we're emotional beasts and we love the club, and there's no doubt that we're in a bad spot right now but the future is definitely bright. But when this person says this Then replace Emenalo with Hiddink. Then in the summer recruit Mourinho to come back and rebuild the fortress and restore our former formidable reputation. Then sack Gourlay and employ a proper CEO who knows the football business. As in knows football. And also knows business. That Peter Kenyon chap seemed to know a bit about both. Then Roman, walk away. Sell the club. Move away from everything Chelsea. I trust you to sell to the right people but your time is done. You’ve used us to gain the respectability you crave. It’s time to move on and let new money, new ideas and new visions to set the club’s strategy. Yes, Roman, strategy. All top ‘businesses’ have it. Lots of top clubs have it. Even Arsenal have it. You don’t though, and whilst you don’t then neither does the club outside of building the brand and attracting revenue. Then you have to ask 'what the fuck? He doesn't say why we should sack these people or what exactly they've done wrong. It's pathetic. But not as pathetic as calling for Roman to leave. This is where the author goes from 'normal fan despairing' to 'spoilt child trying to walk this club off a cliff'. Roman's tenure has been erratic at times, but its been working towards something bigger than this club ever dreamt of being just 10 years ago. He's made mistakes, but he's not made the same ones and he's trying to give the fans what they want (stability in the managerial position, a younger squad, sustainable success). Yes we're struggling but some people need perspective.

And yet in that game our midfield was poor in the second-half and failed to control the game, so even at his very best you have to wonder whether he is the right player for us. Ramires is great when we play with our backs to the wall. His explosive pace allows us to break with speed against teams in transition. Do you think that anyone connected with the club has any intention of playing like that in the future? If no, where does Ramires fit in the starting XI?

I had a little trouble shifting my tickets for this one. It's one thing to be shit but there's plenty of fans feeling a disconnect with the current regime (Benitez). £60 on a Sunday, plus travel is a lot to be served that.

Or we were chasing the game. I like how you've gone from suggesting it's absurd to point him out for the first goal to acknowledging he 'could have done better'. I'm glad you threw in his passing completion stats too - it wouldn't be a Mikel thread without one. 90% pass completion today. Like I said, he very rarely makes the team worse but he also rarely makes it better. He's a shirt-filler, and very little more. It's not urgent that we replace him because we have other areas we need to invest him but when Chalobah does take over from him (as I hope he does) you'll find very few fans shedding a tear when he leaves.