The Big Drog

Did we? Wigan had more of the ball still, we got the goal while playing the 4-2-3-1 but that was simply a moment of brilliance via Ashley Cole, not some intricate, beautiful move. Also after we went ahead, Wigan did push forward and they did get a few attempts on goal before AVB brought Mikel on so clearly he was worried about the growing threat of Wigan and wanted to make the midfield more solid, I have no problem with the manger wanting to do that and we are playing away and leading.

Ironically a lot of the posts on this thread say that Mata should have been kept on (despite playing poorly) and that Kalou shouldn't be brought on. However even Kalou when he comes on seems to be more involved in the game than Torres does.

The problem with your theory is that you are going on the assumption that we would have scored a second had we stuck with the 4-2-3-1 and that is complete guess work, I could just as easily argue that we would have lost 2-1 had we kept with the 4-2-3-1, of course my argument would have no basis in fact, just like your argument has no basis in fact.

If Defoe is the bloody saviour then it's time for us to pack it in.

Even a poor Drogba looks better than Torres these days and lets not forget, Didier had a couple of good moments too, some of his one touch passing was very clever and he was unlucky not to score in the first half with a header.

Spot on. Though while Cech must take the majority of the blame for the goal, the team were lifeless and that is down to the players.

He does need to be loaned out in January to a Premier League team. We've seen how well that has worked for Sturridge and I think McEachran is more a "Sturridge" than a "Kakuta", I think Josh would thrive out on loan and come back to us next season as a player ready to start games.

Who knows, maybe he might be the subject of a minor miracle and burst into life but I really doubt it and given how poor our midfield was today and that Wigan were playing with a very deep 5 man backline this was exactly the kind of game that Chelsea's version of Torres would have been absolutely redundant in.

And Fernando " I might actually score this time!" Torres would have done better? Given how little service Drogba (a striker who actually looks to get on the ball and create) got, imagine just how entirely ineffective Torres would have been today.

lol really? Take a read of this thread in full. Take a read of the AVB thread, he is getting criticism on here for some absolutely ridiculous things. You are saying there are no AVB haters on here? Id say there are almost as many AVB haters on here as there is in the media.

He looked better when he has played at right back but I've never fancied his as a high quality centre back, he always seems to have a mistake in him, he was also partially to blame for the equaliser and could easily have cost us with his shocking pass back to Cech.

Or.... he simply thinks that Drogba would have a greater impact on the game than Torres, an opinion which would be justified given Fernando's bout of invisibility since joining Chelsea.

The AVB haters don't want a manager, they want somebody who can see into the future., or, more likely, they just want a scapegoat.

You thought the days of Mike, Malouda and Kalou on at the same time were over but mate AVB's choices right now are so limited and that could really hurt us in this busy Christmas period where the squad is of the utmost importance, with Anelka and Alex on their way out it has limited AVB even further in what he can do and if, like today, he is missing 2 starters like Ramires and Luiz, it means he inevitably has to call on Malouda, Kalou and Mikel.

Poor, really poor. Lifeless is the word to describe that. It is ridiculous blaming AVB, its not his fault that Ramires was unavailable due to injury, his drive was sorely lacking today and it isn;t his fault that Luiz wasn't available, Ivanovic looked shaky at centre back and Bosingwa is a comedy of errors. He didn't set the team out with a high line so can't blame him for that. People are mentioning the substitutions but it isn;t his fault either that our squad quality means that the best we can bring on are Kalou, Malouda and Mikel. Kalou was brought on so we could witch to a 4-2-3-1 to get Mata more involved through the centre, once we went a goal ahead Wigan were threatening so Mikel was brought on to create the 3 in midfield again and maybe Sturridge was tired or AVB thought it a chance to give Malouda a bit of a run. We all accept that signings have to be made in January and today we saw why, our bench isn't of the quality required. You could see the Wigan equaliser coming from a mile away, with the way we had played up until the game it was always coming. Bosingwa completely loses Rodellega, allows him goal side and he gets a shot off but the main fault for the goal lies with Cech, it is a routine save, this hasn't been the best season for Cech and today was arguably his worst game of the season. First half in particular, we were pedantic, slow, plodding and predictable, not enough off the ball movement, not enough ideas, no spark of invention. Second half that improved slightly but nowhere near enough, unless people were hoping for AVB to don the Chelsea jersey and be the Modric type player we sorely lack then Im not sure how he can be blamed unless you are accusing him of setting his team out to play slow, boring football. Positives? Ashley Cole played well and his pass to Sturridge was straight out of the top drawer. Sturridge looked lively when we got the ball to him and always looked like beating his man, shame we couldn't work the ball to him more often in dangerous positions. John Terry did well at the back and commanded the line as the captain should. That is where the positives end. The negatives? Our slim chance of winning the league has probably all but died, despite the sterling work AVB has done in creating a more free flowing football team the limitations were there to see today, as talented a coach as he is, he can't make players like Malouda, Kalou and Bosingwa into the top quality standard players, come January we need to buy 1 or 2 quality players to improve the squad and ensure a top 4 finish.

Very interesting game, against Valencia (and to an extent Man City) we played on the counter attack, that is very much Napoli's main style of play so it will be interesting to see who takes the initiative and attempts to dominate the game. The back four will have to be at their best to stop Napoli's quick attacks and dangermen like Cavani, Hamsik and Lavezzi. That being said, we should be very thankful that we qualified top of our group because had we not, that could have been us in Bayer Leverkusen's place, playing Barcelona. As BlueLion said, Napoli will be a real test but it is the kind of test we need to get momentum going in the competition and though it will be tough I think we can qualify.

Very talented striker, still young and he has the attributes to succeed in the Premier League and he would probably suit AVB's style. However I very much doubt that Real Madrid would sell him, particularly in January when they are already quite low on strikers and I doubt that he would want to leave Madrid.

Over the course of the last 10 years only 3 different teams have won the Premier League. Over the course of the last 10 years only 3 different teams have won La Liga. Though they did struggle in Europe, it was still quite a talented team consisting of the likes of Robben, Sneijder, Van Nistelrooy, Cannavaro, Beckham ect. at different periods during that run. This is Real Madrid, it is the biggest club in all of the world so yes they will always have expected to get top 2 in their league. That doesn't prove that the Premier League is more competitive, as stats from The Guardian have proven, over the course of the last 10 years La Liga has been the more competitive league.

Your basis for the argument that there is a huge gap between defences in the Premier League to La Liga seems to mainly be based around the fact that there aren't many upsets against the top two teams, my argument would be that that isn't because the smaller teams are hugely weaker than their English counterparts, rather I would say it shows just how good Real Madrid and Barcelona are that they don't fall victim to upsets.

A very interesting article from The Guardian. It's the most competitive league in the world. Anybody can beat anybody on their day. There are no easy games in this league. The mantra of thePremier League apologists is well known. Every time a team from the Little Fourteen (as nobody ever calls them) plays a team from the Big Three (it is just three now, right?) the cliches come trotting along: in our league nobody gives anybody anything, everything's a glorious struggle. It's nonsense, of course: it's obvious the Premier League is a closed shop that can be opened only with the application of around a quarter of a billion pounds. In England in the past decade there have been three different champions. That's the same as Spain, Italy and Portugal, poorer than France (four), and Germany and Russia (five). But then in the past decade there have been Champions League winners from England, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and not from France, Germany or Russia. It seems fairly obvious that competitiveness is something that must be balanced against quality: would fans prefer an exciting domestic league, or for teams from that league to do well in continental competition? That's not to say that a low number of different champions is necessarily a sign of strength or high quality. In Croatia, Dinamo Zagreb have won the league for the past six seasons and made next to no impression in Europe. The problem, Igor Biscan said, is that their players get used to winning easily; come a tough match, a game against a side of even slightly lesser ability, in which they have to do things that don't come naturally, like defending, they have no idea what to do. "Our players walk through games against villages so they forget how to run," as a Crvena Zvezda director put it to me a couple of years ago. "But what are we meant to do? Buy players for the other teams in the league as well?" Rangers and Celtic have perhaps suffered from that at times in Europe, which may mean that the domination of European football by Barcelona and Real Madrid many have predicted is not quite so sustainable as many think. That in turn is something to consider for those who would tweak the balance of competition in the Premier League by doing away with collective bargaining for TV rights (quite apart from asking whether the product will remain so appealing if games are hideously one-sided). That answer to the Zvezda official's question, in fact, may end up being "yes", if only indirectly. If you want a true range of champions, you need to leave Europe. There have been six different champions in Japan in the past decade, seven in Brazil. In Argentina, where the apertura-clausura system means there have been 20 championships in the past decade, there have been 11 different winners – but there the spread of champions seems a function of weakness, with the best players from the best sides being skimmed off by predators from Europe and Brazil after each championship in what's effectively a reverse of the draft system in US sports. But even if we accept competitiveness per se as a good thing, there are different types of competitiveness. After all, while there have been five different champions in the past decade in Germany, Bayern Munich have won the title five times, the same number as Manchester United, Barcelona and Internazionale (Porto and Lyon, incidentally, are the most successful individual clubs in the 10 leagues considered with seven titles each in the past decade). In effect, in Germany there is a Big One and, if they fire, nobody else has much of a chance. Whether one giant and a handful of occasional challengers is preferable to two or three giants is debatable. Looking at the number of champions, though, says little about whether a team at the bottom can beat a team at the top. To try to come up with a statistical basis for assessing competitiveness within a league, I looked at four metrics across the 10 leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Japan) over the past decade: the average gap from first to second at the end of the season (how dominant is the champion?); the average gap from first to fourth (is it only two or three teams who challenge the champion?); the average gap from first to last (what's the gulf in quality from top to bottom?); and the average gap from fourth to fourth-bottom (what's the difference in quality between the mid-ranking sides?). Because different leagues have different formats and are different sizes, these gaps have all been expressed as points-per-game. (Points deductions were ignored). Team 1st-2nd 1st-4th 1st-last 4th-4th last England 0.17 0.52 1.92 0.79 Spain 0.14 0.5 1.42 0.62 Italy 0.19 0.53 1.66 0.68 Germany 0.2 0.4 1.4 0.71 France 0.19 0.42 1.3 0.54 Portugal 0.27 0.72 1.68 0.64 Russia 0.11 0.34 1.49 0.68 Brazil 0.17 0.33 1.18 0.56 Argentina 0.17 0.46 1.5 0.7 Japan 0.19 0.36 1.39 0.62 In terms of exciting title races, it turns out that Russia is the place to be, with Spain some way back, and the rest trailing far behind. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Porto's domination, Portugal has the highest gap from first to second, but what is striking is that Germany has had the second-least-close title races over the past decade, a fifth of a point-per-game separating first from second. The gap between first and fourth in the Bundesliga, though, is the fourth smallest of the 10 leagues surveyed, the gap from top to bottom the third smallest and the gap from fourth to fourth-bottom the smallest. That suggests that the leader often streaks away while the rest remain relatively tightly bunched. The biggest gap from first to fourth is in Portugal. Again, that's in line with expectations: since the second world war, only Belenenses and Boavista, once each, have interrupted the flow of titles for Porto, Benfica and Sporting. There is a very clear historical Big Three who continue to dominate. In Italy, similarly, the two Milan clubs and Juventus (calciopolinotwithstanding) have clearly been dominant. What is perhaps unexpected, though, is that England have the third-biggest average gap from first to fourth: perhaps the Big Four was always something of a myth. Brazil has the smallest gap from first to fourth, which it is tempting to ascribe to the size of the country. A population of almost 200 million can perhaps sustain more big clubs that smaller nations. It is also worth noting, though, the relative immaturity of a national championship in Brazil; it could be that as the present system becomes more established, money and success gravitates to a more select few. But what's really telling is the last two columns, which show that there is a bigger gap between top and bottom of the Premier League and between fourth and fourth bottom in the Premier League than in any of the other nine leagues under consideration. Far from being the most competitive league in the world, in fact, it turns out to be the least. The league where the bottom is closest to the top, rather, is Brazil, which is remarkable when you consider that the statistics include the 28-team top flight of 2001 and the slow contraction to 20 in 2006 – the more teams there are, the wider you would expect that divide to be. Now of course an analysis of points tells only part of the story. It may be, in some hard-to-quantify way, that lower Premier League teams fight harder before losing to the big guns, and it certainly is true that the culture of arranged games, mutually beneficial draws and the like, seems less pronounced in England than elsewhere. In terms of hard statistics, though, the message is clear. The Premier League may lead the way in terms of marketing and self-promotion, but if you want competitiveness, go to Russia or Brazil. Next week, I'll look at how competitiveness has changed in England over time, what the reasons for those changes may be and what the potential impact of scrapping collective bargaining for television rights may be.

I think we should bite the hand off whoever is offering 20 million, I like Torres, I really do but it hasn't happened for him at Chelsea. He is back to the level he was at when he first arrived, he seems to have lost pace (his main asset) and his confidence is non-existent, at the moment he is a passenger in our squad and we can't afford passengers (particularly not ones that cost 50 million) so yes, if an offer of 20 million came in, Id love for our club to take it, invest it in a talented young striker and lets all move on.

Ronaldo scored freely in England in his last 2 seasons in the league so that does disparage the myth that defending in La Liga is way poorer than in the Premier League, I watch a considerable amount of both leagues and there isn't a huge gulf in difference between the quality of defending in both leagues. In England, most teams have giant, generic English style centre backs to deal with the physicality of the Premier League, in Spain they tend to have more technical defenders to deal with the more technical style encountered regularly in La Liga.

Isn't it amazing that in a week where he defeated Newcastle 3-0, he defeated Valencia 3-0 and qualified top of his Champions League group (while Man Utd and Man City were eliminated at the group stage) and then ended City's unbeaten run with a 2-1 victory, I browse through the papers this morning to find, what I expected to be AVB tributes as far as the eye can see, and yet I don't see those, infact look at The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Telegraph's websites and you will be hard pressed to find a complimenting word towards AVB on any of those sites. Had Mourinho, Ferguson or (God forbid) Harry Redknapp achieved this we would be overloaded with tales of their genius until we literally started puking compliments about that manager from the ear. Villas Boas didn't get the media darling treatment, what a surprise. However I do enjoy listening to AVB talk football. At times under other managers there seemed to be a bit of a vagueness about how we were set up, under AVB every detail is accounted for.

Big difference is that Romeu is actually an outstanding talent by any standard while Mikel has split Chelsea fans for years, with the majority I've talked to feeling that he is sub-par.

The Premier League is overrated by the people who cover it. The Premier League hype we are force-fed is fed to us by those who make money from the league. Sky hype it up a head spinning amount because the Premier League is Sky's premier brand and the main reason people get Sky Sports installed in the first place, it is their great money spinner so of course they will vehemently claim that it is the best league in the world. The newspapers and tv shows (with it's ex Premier League pundits) will also claim it to be the best league in the world because their papers are sold on the back of Premier League coverage and stories and the tv shows are based around the Premier League. Then amongst some there is just the plain bias of English people supporting the English league. In reality it isn't the best league in the world. It isn't the most competitive league in the world. It doesn't have the best players or the best teams in the world. It doesn't have the best brand of football in the world. There are many leagues more competitive than the Premier League (over the last 10 years that includes La Liga), the best players in the world play in Spain, the two best teams in the world are Spanish and arguably the third best team in the world are German and the football in Spain throughout the league is far better from a technical point of view than it is in England. That isn't to say the Premier League doesn't have its positives. It is a very fast paced, physical style of football that a lot of us in England and Britain can relate to because that is the kind of football we ourselves were taught as young kids. Some people might find that having no outstanding team in the league creates a more exciting title race and some very talented players do ply their trade in England. For a while the Premier League was the best league in the world, at one point in time Chelsea and Man Utd were the two best teams in the world but times have changed, La Liga and Spanish football in general has grown stronger and it still has a lot of room to grow (Malaga's growth and the almost inevitability of smaller Spanish sides getting more TV money in the future). Of course I enjoy watching the Premier League and I support Chelsea but those claiming that this is "the best Premier League season ever" are lying through their teeth, either through greed for more money, an extreme level of bias or simply pure stupidity.