The only place to be

I think you have a point with them not being good enough. Mancienne never kicked on and Cork was unlucky to be in a crowded position. I think you could probably include Bridcutt as one who needed more time than we were prepared to give him. Sinclair really never showed enough and I think he's going to end up leaving City sooner rather than later. I also think you make a good point about what our academy is supposed to do. Primarily it's supposed to develop youngsters for the first-team and that's something it's underperformed at, but there's also this rather cynical business of developing players for sale. If you look at something like the Stoch sale (reported to be about £4 million) then we seem to be doing well in that department and sales like that can then be re-invested in dozens more kids. But going back to this sea-change at the club, I think the calibre of player we're developing has improved dramatically and I live in hope that they'll be given chances to compete for places in the team but that requires stability in the managerial position. What I will say is that I don't think we've had a prospect as good as Chalobah in a long-time. With Kakuta there were question marks over his ability to impose himself on matches as there are with a lot of flair players, whilst McEachran still has a lot to prove when it comes to the physical aspect of the game. With Chalobah, he simply has to answer the question 'can he do it at the next level?'. The problem facing all academies in this country is the same it's always been - too many players get lost between under-19 teams and first-team football, but what I think our board need to be praised for is securing a number of worthwhile loan moves for some of the youngsters. That's something we struggled with in the past.

That's a fair point, but it's hard to really know who to blame. Let's be honest, no big decision is made without Roman's say-so, so ultimately he's the one who should bear a lot of the blame but as I said above I think (or hope) he's learnt from his mistakes. If we take the Torres signing and the Ancelotti sacking as a watershed moment (granted it's about a six month period) then you can see real changes in the way the club has operated. Transfer fees on average came down whilst the age of the player being bought dropped too. We had a massive intake class in the youth team that season and again this season (16 players if I recall) and Roman appointed a young manager with a view to a long term commitment. Now certain things didn't work out but the right noises were being made. Even now we have 22 players out on loan with the majority of them young kids who we would look to make part of the first-team squad. We're sprinting to do that now because we weren't doing it effectively 3-5 years ago. The problem is that if you want to blame the hierarchy, some of the main culprits simply aren't around anymore. The constants have been Buck, Barnard and maybe Tenenbaum. People like Gourlay and Emenalo seem to be doing their jobs pretty well, Gourlay on the commercial side and Emenalo on the scouting side. There's just this gap between 2005 and 2011 where we probably weren't doing what we should have been doing and we're paying for it now.

It absolutely depends on who we get in the summer, but I wrote elsewhere that I think the Pep saga has been a massive wake-up call to Roman. He was led on and then rejected, something that hasn't happened during his time at Chelsea. For most people that would be a humbling experience and I think Jose might be experiencing one of those in Madrid too. If the two have learnt something then maybe they can come together and build something special here. There have been many mistakes made at the club, but the encouraging thing is that we seem to have learnt from them and not repeated them. We just need to learn how to do better with managers......

tl;dr

First things first, this will probably be long. I abhor verbosity in others, so I will apologise now for engaging in my own long-winded soliloquy. It's also going to be a bit scattered. I would call it a first-draft, but that implies there would be a second-draft and there won't be. I haven't even spell-checked this sucker so I apologise for it being somewhat unreadable in parts. Everything from this point on is my own opinion and I am very biased. I’ve been extremely fortunate in that this club has been on an upswing ever since I started going and I personally don’t want that to end, so it’s unlikely I’ll countenance the idea of this club returning to mid-table mediocrity any time soon. But there are a few truths that I wanted to get out of the way first just to give an idea where I’m starting from. We weren’t the best team in Europe last year. Now that doesn’t really matter much since sport isn’t about the best team or the best individual winning. It’s about the team who performs best on the day, who has that slice of luck or rub of the green or bounce of the ball or whatever cliche you want to use. The best sports stories aren’t always about dominant teams steamrolling their way to glory because that’s usually fairly boring. The best tales, the ones that live long in the memory and inspire the majority of people who live lives of quiet desperation are the ones about teams beating the odds and winning when no-one expected them to. That was us and it brings me on to my second point that..... Winning the Champions League papered over a lot of cracks. I’m talking chasm-sized cracks that were the result of poor planning, bad decisions and short-term thinking. Despite that I think that.... Roman has learnt his lesson. He’s not a stupid man by any measure and I absolutely love the man not just for what he’s done for the club but for what this club seems to mean to him. I don’t pretend to have any special insight into his mind, but I do know what I see and that’s a man who seems to love the very notion of owning a football club. People deride us as his ‘little plaything’ but what’s the point in owning a club if you can’t have fun? Sure you have the owners like Bill Kenwright or Dave Whelan who put themselves through hell for the love for their clubs, but there are also the likes of the Glazers or the much-loathed Arsenal board who use it as either scaffolding for their other businesses or simply one more investment in their portfolio. Roman unabashedly loves watching this team and isn’t afraid to unleash his jerky spasms whenever we get near the goal. But.... He didn’t learn it fast enough and this season is his, and our, punishment. The mistakes we made are all to familiar, although much-exaggerated by the media. We spent too much on established players which meant our team became old and there was no-one behind them to pick up the slack or take the reigns. The core of this team is still very much the one Mourinho built and the Champions League win was achieved on the backs of Cech, Cole, Terry, Lampard and Drogba. That win against the odds came through sheer force of will of some of the strongest personalities we’ve ever had at the club but I think we will come to look back at that triumph in Munich as the last hurrah of a great group of players who were into year 7 of, at best, a 5-year plan. One of the cracks it papered over was the fact that we finished Sixth in the League. Any other season that would’ve been unacceptable but we had two trophies to point to as well as Villas-Boas to blame for getting us into that position in the first place. Now I’m no great fan of AVB and he made enough mistakes in managing the team for his sacking to be rationalised, but I think he was a victim of player power. I’ve already acknowledged that our players’ strong personalities are what carried this team over the finishing line against Barcelona and Bayern, and also very nearly did the same for Avram Grant, but you can’t celebrate the good that can come from having such dominant men in the locker room without recognising that it can be problematic when someone comes in trying to change a few things. AVB simply wasn’t ready for something like that and the players had become used to a certain way of doing things. This is one of the mistakes I think Roman made - he didn’t coin the term ‘Untouchables’ but it seems increasingly true. The senior players attained such power simply because they became the constant at the club. They became the dominant personalities in lieu of a manager who could assert himself on this club and put a bit of himself into it. Ancelotti was a great manager for us, but it never felt like his team. It still felt like Jose’s and it’s sad to say but we, the club and the fans, haven’t moved on from him. He popped our cherry and no-one has measured up to him since. Now we’re stuck with possibly the worst possible choice for Chelsea manager and we’re at possibly the lowest ebb that I can remember in a fair while, yet if we’re honest the main feeling when he was hired wasn’t one of shock but of quiet resignation. The pursuit of Pep became all-encompassing for the club and Roman was strung along by this exotic lothario for almost two years before reality dawned and the stability of Bayern Munich (and let’s be honest, they’re the best team by far right now in Germany) appealed more to a man who seems to think three years at any one club is about the maximum before burning out and going somewhere else. I won’t say this was the first time that Roman was turned down by someone because I simply don’t know, but it was the first time that such a slap in the face was delivered to the owner of Chelsea Football Club in full view of the English media, and his German counterparts weren’t shy in pointing it out to him. Which is where we reach the part where the recriminations end and we try to look to the future, resplendent in it’s as-yet untarnished beauty. 1.We’re not signing Andrei Shevchenko again. That’s a very specific thing to celebrate considering he was rather mediocre in his time here, but I’m using Sheva as a symbol of the reckless spending that was the signature of Roman’s first few years in charge and culminated in the signing of Torres (who will in time take on Lord Voldemort proportions at this club and simply be referred to as ‘he who shall not be named’). Unless your surname is Sutton, Veron or Mutu then I’ll assume your opinion on our signing of El Abominationo is somewhat negative but there’s a couple of things to note. Since the signing of Torres, our average transfer fee has been around £10 million and the average age of the signing has been less than 22. Despite that we’ve signed some players who show signs of being capable of filling positions for many years (Azpilicueta, Lukaku, Courtois, Moses) as well as players like Mata and Ba who have come straight into the team and made a massive difference. That suggests a massive swing towards sustainability over short-term gains. 2.We have a fantastic youth academy, that is apparently now the premier choice of tabloid royalty! Or if you want to celebrate something more tangible, there are the two FA Youth Cups in the last three seasons. I won’t bother listing the names of players who might be good, but it’s important to recognise that there are quite a lot of them in all positions. 3.The financial situation seems better. Yay for creative accounting - long may it continue. So going forward things look positive, but that brings us onto this season and our punishment. This season will go down as one of the most tumultuous on record, coming in the midst of scandal and the club seemingly lurching from one PR mishap to another. We’ve got the smallest squad I can remember for a while and the players we might look to simply put on the bench are off plying their trade at other clubs. But that is another result of the mistakes of the past. These players should have been behind older guys in the pecking order, but those guys never matured from the academy for a number of reasons, but primarily because of poor planning. Only now are we truly reaping some of the seeds sown in the Youth Academy, but we’re in a holding position where they aren’t yet ready to contribute. If you look at the likes of Cleverley and Welbeck or even Jones and Smalling at United, they had time at other clubs where they learnt what being part of the first-team was all about before they joined United’s first-team. We just haven’t had those kids come through and the players who might have backed up the first team like Essien or Benayoun were signed to big contracts that were agreed before we entered this period of austerity. Calling this a period of transition is an understatement because it’s not simply a few personnel changes that are being made, but the way the whole club is being run has been completely restructures and it comes down to that one word - sustainability. That’s what I cling to. I have to look at the multitude of challenges facing this club at the moment and think that it’s part of a bigger plan. When Roman first took over he had to spend big to get us to the top of the tree, but we can’t expect him to pump tens of millions of pounds into the club year after year. There are also external challenges like FFP and even the new television deal which means prices might be pushed up even further, all of which means that we have to be run like a business. I sincerely believe this is as bad as it gets for us now, and I know the 10 year old me would kill for this to be his bad. We’re a battered, wounded ship drifting towards the safety of shore with an inept Captain Pugwash at the wheel and some of the crew facing up to the reality that they aren’t going to see another glorious voyage with us. But the hull will be strengthened, the masts will be repaired and we’ll set sail with another skipper at the helm and we’ll see many a new sunrise on the horizon. And in five months time fatty gets to walk the plank..... Click here to view the article

You make a few points but you do admit that the current style doesn't suit him, which isn't the case with the other players you mentioned except Giggs maybe. You have to wonder where he fits in the team in that case. Also, I don't know if calling him the 'soul of the team' is a good point when we've just given a soulless performance in the greatest cup competition on Earth against a local rival we rarely get a chance to play. I'd also contend that Mata has increasingly become the heart of our team.

I was prepared to give him a chance more in hope than expectation, but the guy is simply appalling in every respect. I loathe seeing his fat face on tv because he's so uncharismatic and talks so much bollocks. He's just not Chelsea in any way, shape or (especially) form. I think the board look at all the players we're going to have in the summer and think we may not need to spend huge amounts, or that the players who we might want (Modric for example) won't be available until then. This season is simply us paying the price for the fuck-ups in team planning up until 2010-2011.

I didn't mean it in a properly insulting way. Honest. My view on sportspeople is this - if you play sports for a living then you have to at least be in good shape. The only exceptions are people who don't play proper sports (golfists, dartists, etc.) and fatties like big Nev. Turnball is nothing but a seat-filler. He's not a young kid looking to impress and he isn't an older head who has had his career and is now just a steady presence. He's given up. He's in the prime of his career and he's happy to bloat up and take a wage on the bench and we really shouldn't give him that chance.

Absolute fucking garbage. Easy to ignore him when he so rarely plays but for those one or two games a season where he does and we're not humping shitehouse teams 5-0 in the League Cup he's simply not good enough. And I know you're the backup keeper but that's no excuse to have bitch tits you fat fucking disgrace. We used to have reliable backups like Hitchy or Frode or even Carlo but this cunt is pathetic.

Barcelona really are so dominant - in fact I can't think of any team or individual dominating a sport like they have since Lance Armstrong in Le Tour.

Normally I'd suggest that slagging off Benitez wasn't the best way to support the team.....but we did play better in the second-half so what the fuck do I know.

Middlesbrough away. Great. Not shit enough so we can rest our most important players.

I doubt he'll be fit which means another 90 minutes of Lampard/Ramires. Cech, Azpi and Ba back, Ivanovic back in the middle with JT and Marin alongside Mata and Oscar.

I'd normally agree but having seen Spurs go out and us facing at least one more game when we really don't have the squad to fight on multiple fronts, I think we have to be a bit more pragmatic for just this one season and focus on what's most important.

Putting out the reserves. Saville, Feruz, Lalkovic, Swifty, Marin, Ferreira, Bertrand etc. Having seen the performance today, could it be much worse?

Say we get to the semi-final. That means pushing back the Spurs home game to possibly after an away trip to Liverpool, or after a home game to Swansea or maybe even to before or after games against Man United (away), Aston Villa (fighting for survival) or Everton (pushing for top four possibly). That's if we don't progress in the Europa League, and today demonstrated that we simply can't rest Mata who already looks like he's ready for flip-flops and a beach.

Because we're not all that good at the moment. That's a pretty good reason isn't it? We've got no midfield and no leadership from the sidelines. We sacked a manager in November. We're essentially a damaged ship trying desperately to make it to shore where we can start to rebuild. We're lucky that the teams around us have been relatively poor this season. Trying to win trophies should be a distant second to making sure we're in the Champions League next season. Deserve? Fuck deserve. We're beyond deserving shit. We need to just make sure we're okay to start doing stuff next season. We need to be able to go to managers and players in the summer and say 'we want you to be part of our Champions League challenge' not 'would you like to have your photo taken with the FA Cup?'.

The Spurs fans I know want to get back into the Champions League. They finished fourth last year and that is what they want to achieve this season, so whilst a cup might be nice it isn't the most important thing. Hopefully this won't come back to bite us on the backside in May.

You suggested it with your team suggestions. 1. Great, so he's not going to defend. That'll be fun for Ashley or Azpi. It's not nitpicking to be honest. It's just honest criticism, and if this summer isn't a massive rebuilding period then we're going to be in trouble.

I disagree. They have a thin squad like us and they want Champions League football more than challenging for the FA Cup.

So he shouldn't be a regular, but when he does we should change the shape of the team to accomodate him? In one of those two teams you've suggested, you've moved our most important player out to the wing from where he's been most effective and in the other you've dropped him completely. This is going to be the biggest summer of rebuilding that we've had since Roman took over - I'd say it's the perfect time to turn the page. We let Drogba go last season, Lamps this summer and next summer I expect Terry will go. We'll still have Cole, Terry and Cech going into next season - that's a fairly gradual change isn't it?

Spurs have one less game now, we've got at least one more and probably two.

He's not being shot down. He makes a valid point about who should we get in, but there's a great felling amongst fans that they simply don't want the fat cunt in charge. It doesn't feel like our club at the moment and that's got a lot to do with him being in charge. Getting him out of the club would change that.

In a way, this decision not to spend is encouraging. It suggests that the club are trying to save money to spend in the summer when we've hopefully got someone else in. I don't particularly trust Rafa to be involved in transfers and I really don't want him to be if I'm honest, plus I'm not sure if there's much value in the market. We're stuck with him until summer (although I'd have more trust in Stevie Holland going forward) unless Jose gets sacked before then and we can get him in. Just look forward to that day when the fat cunt leaves this club.

Fair enough.