Closed Shakhtar Donetsk 2-1 Chelsea

[underdrog 18]

i rem once when torres pulled the trigger from outsideof the box and some chelsea player blocked it,looked like mata.think that was goal bound...nevertheless...have we shoot ourselves in foot by trusting torres ??

[Stingray 9,441]

I think Oscar was bad, despite his goal. Hazard was also fucking awful, the guy needs to learn how to shoot, he usually go to the pitch esily. Mata was far from good. Ramires was our better player in the midfield.

Terry was in a bad day.

Well, I think Torres was decent in the first half, imo he was our best attacking player in the first 45 minutes. Hazard and Oscar were not better than the spaniard today.

Say what? Sorry but Torres was way worse then Hazard, mate.

Wtf ...

[Jase 43,479]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7D2nm6xwpc&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cuIQWGZDoY&feature=plcp

Is it just me or does Luiz speaks like Torres there?!

[Strike 7,490]

Support your team through to the end mate, regardless of performance

nah. you don't know the situation. it wasn't aired live here so i was watching the repeat at 4 in the morning. at HT i just checked the result and got over it

[TrippingStep 336]

Shaktar are the best team of this group.

They had also many chances to score against Juventus and should have won against them.

To have a chance in this match, we shouldn't have conceded the goal this early in the match. Their work rate and pace were killing us in the counter-attacks. The positive thing is they didn't score more and often shooted in the middle of our goal or didn't connect well on their occasions in the 6 meters line in their free-kick and corners.

I think we should work on a 4-3-3 for the next match against them and work on the positioning and team pressing, where to press, trying to trap them in a side of the pitch.

Mikel in front of the defence, Ramires oscar in front of him, working more on overlap patterns with Hazard Cole, Mata Ivanovic.

We need to work on run patterns between our player, on the covering track for the three midfielders.

If you look at our best chances yesterday, it was run from behind toward the box or in the hole from Hazard and Oscar.

I think the reason Mata ghosted the game was because when he was marked out high in the pitch near the box, he didn't come back enough for trying to work an other attack. They were often too many of our player on the same line glued to the defenders in attack, making difficult to create space to open up their defenses.

[Ankit 3,176]

We just have to beat Shakhtar at the bridge. I also think we can beat Juve in turin. The game at bridge vs juve came too early in the season, the team has been gelling well since and we should win the match if we apply ourselves properly. But before all that just have to beat Shakhtar at home. That will really open our group with Juve still to travel to dombass arena!!

[StrategiC 73]

I only watched the first half and some footage for the second(had a class), i noticed from what i saw that:

-Torres is a blond shit, he's worth 50 million kick in the face.

- Cech is top class, if he was spanish or italian, people would rate him number 1 in the world.

-We didn't gain any benefits from this match, most players are exhausted and lampard is injured.

The only good thing yesterday was Juve had a tie, so know we are 2nd in the league.

KTBFFH

[Kisho 33]

It was a bad game and thats normal, we cant win every game. Although after the games a few concerns were highlighted while others were emphasised.

1. Prolific striker must be bought in january

I personally am tired of making excuses for torres, i just cant anymore. he is a good option on the bench but i dont believe he is starting 11 material. We need to get a prolific striker come january. I think danny is a good option to use until january and he is definitlety better than torres because at least he takes shots. even playing torres along side sturridge might provide us with a bit more fire power needed. A prolific striker come january is top priority. having three strikers will also alow us to play with 2 strikers if robbie wanted to. it scares that robbie cant see that torres is not not good enough.

2. Formation

can robbie change is formation when he sees that things arent working out. in our usual and only formation 4-2-3-1 ramires and mikel struggled to keep shaktars attack at bay. Its like 4-2-3-1 is all robbie knows. we needed a more a more defensive formation with quick counter attacks last night. yet no change in formation was made throughout the game. 4-5-1 or 4-4-1-1 maybe with mikel and romeu in the centre of midfield and ramires RM and bertrand LM attacking and helping our defence, providing cover for cole and ivano when they get foward.

3. cahill and luiz

I think they need time to gel. choping and changing our centre backs in my opinion is not a good idea. i think cahill and luiz should of started, especially with man u around the corner.

Anyway i'm no professional tactition, its just some of my concerns. now lets dust ourselves off and go demolish the red devils!

[CHOULO19 24,332]

Now that I slept on it I can see the half full of the cup. I honestly think we can benefit from that defeat, we were getting extremely over-confident recently. Hopefully this will wake the players up for Manure.

On the other side we really need to win the last three matches if we are to top the group.

[Spike 12,049]

The only reason this game was lost due to shite passing decsions and shite passing in general.

[Drogzola 283]

We all know inside that nothing is going to be done about Torres in the near future. I hope I am proven wrong as I would like to see Sturridge given a good run out, NOT against Man United though as I feel we shouldn't rock the boat just yet.

[Dargo 6]

Only 2 stand out players for me. Cech and Mikel.

[Milan 17,958]

My internet connection fucked up yesterday and only now I had some man to fix it so I missed everything Only managed to see the goals and Cech's saves. At least Juventus didn't win, although they could lose! I suppose we will be motivated against Man United, to prove everyone wrong after yesterday. And Man United could have heads way too high.

[Jype 6,398]

Couldn't watch the game but seems it was a very tough match, as I expected. A loss definitely made things harder but it's not the end of the world because Juventus also managed to fuck things up with Nordsjaelland so at the moment it's all good. All we have to do is beat Shakhtar at the Bridge and get a point at Juventus away.

[Ollie 4,400]

It wasn't THAT bad, i mean they got an early goal and we were always chasing the game after that. It's not easy playing a prem game to then play a game against a team like Shakhtar who are very good in possession. We played ok i thought, just lack that clinical striker and the final ball. I gave my MOTM to JT anyway because watching him closely, his positioning was immaculate, he intercepted so many passes and read the game unbelievably well showing his strength and know-how Cech was awesome but he made saves i'd expect him to make, their average finishing and JT's reading of the game helped us keep it down to 2.

Was pissed off with Hazard for the 2nd goal, it was so early in the half it killed all momentum and ended the game. We had a chance if we had held on longer, the finish was very good though, i thought his touch was maybe a bit heavy but he buried it. Surprised how we were so exposed though once they nicked the ball, i feared the worst straight away.

All in all, i'm not too disappointed, especially as Juve dropped points. If we can beat Shakhtar at home, Juve are in deep shit. If only we hung on against them. Still in our hands. Last season was similar tbh look how we went through that group.

Now i worry about this time of year. We notoriously start well then collapse about now. Last season we lost to Leverkusen away around the same time as a Prem/League Cup home double header with Liverpool. Now we have that same double header with Man Utd, again both games at the bridge. We can't let this defeat be the catalyst of a bad run that slides us down the table like last season.

This is a big test now.

[Land 331]

We lost 1 very tough game and you guys want to change formation?stop overreacting

[Milan 17,958]

Well, we have to gain 6 points from our home games and keep fingers crossed Juventus will keep on their run full of draws lol.

[CFCRazor 49]

Personally I think the entire out field team played shit last night, there I said it. Cech kept us in the game as much as he could but there is only so many shots he can save after a relentless onslaught.

Mikel for me seems like he got a boost of ego from the skill that he showed against Tottenham, and that's not what we needed yesterday, rather than trying to beat your first and second man every time you get the ball, maybe sourcing a decent pass would be the better option from time to time. In general yesterday the passing and the overall attacking build up was just shocking. Too slow getting up the field and every time we had a chance to work something up the field a bad pass stopped all progression. I can only imagine what it's like being Petr in games like this where he knows the team are playing shit and it's going to be a very, very tough night of goal action for him...

The problems for me started before the match had even kicked off, in the form of the starting line up.

- I know that Terry is our captain and he isn't going to be playing many matches for the time being for obvious reasons, but picking him over Cahill and Luiz pairing was a mistake, Gary and Luiz are the future. They have been playing well together and at a time when we needed a strong performance against a team like Shakthar, the decision was made to leave one of the pair, who are gelling so well together, out of the equation.

- 2nd mistake of the lineup, putting Lampard in (After just coming back from injury) in what everyone knew was going to be a tough slog, pushing Ramires out on to the wing (yes we all know that he can play there but he hasn't played there once this season), thus leaving Hazard out of the line up... Wtf?! Then the inevitable happened rather early on and we were forced to take Lampard off. Hazard was instated, but at this time was it not too late? Being one goal down in the first minutes of the game and all the pre match training and tactics would have flown out of the window.

- 3rd and most annoying mistake was leaving Torres on for as long as they did, the amount of chances that he had to shoot was depressing me that he wasn't even attempting to connect with the ball, I can forgive him to some extent if he was actually firing and missing, but not shooting and hesitating, dribbling yourself into a corner only to get closed down and losing the ball I cannot.

All in all a night full of blunders and rather bad style of play considering what we have been used to over the past month or so.. Though as people have been saying, you can't win them all, we need to pull ourselves together, brush ourselves off and come away with 2/2 home wins in the group in the remaining 3 games.

[kellzfresh 7,229]

Completely disagree with Rambo performance. He had a very decent game. Our double pivot was the only thing that worked in the game. 7

The main problem yesterday was that after their first goal, chelsea started rushing our build up play and ended up losing the ball quickly.

Ramires then had to run back and make a tackle.

But because of the rushed passes foward, instead of being patient like against totenham, ramires moved forward too early at times(like how lampard usually did) which made him need to come back for the tackle. But bcos of his pace, he could cover that weakness.

But the blame was really how we were rushing foward, I wish we could have been more patient in our build up and force them to leave spaces and make mistakes in their defence. An example was the barcelona winner against celtic. They passed slowly till they got the chance to score instead of risking loosing the posession.

[nachikethas 1,154]

people should stop hating torres. He's still world class. Plays for the team,unselfish passes,sells a lot of shirts for the club and links up the play very well.wat else u needed from a 50striker...oh yah i got it, u needs to score some fucking goals when matters ....ladyboy prick