General Chelsea Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Never mind -cheer up you cunts with this

What a fucking dayyyyyy !!! Still laughing like a drain.

[Vesper 30,085]

13 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Never mind -cheer up you cunts with this

What a fucking dayyyyyy !!! Still laughing like a drain.

another good one

from 4 years back

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

another good one

from 4 years back

 

Epic. I honestly thought it was a lost cause at HT. 

Heroes one and all

[milka 3,390]

[Vesper 30,085]

4 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Epic. I honestly thought it was a lost cause at HT. 

Heroes one and all

watching that REALLY made me miss Eden 

also reminded me what an absolute dirty cunt Agüero was/is

[Jase 43,479]

FOOTBALL IS COMING BACK HOME, BITCHES! 

[Laylabelle 9,534]

Or William and co are lol.

 

[Vesper 30,085]

18 minutes ago, Jason said:

FOOTBALL IS COMING BACK HOME, BITCHES! 

if we fail on Sancho or Havertz or (drop-down) Chukwueze 

we seriously may well have to super twist Willian's arm to take a 2 year  contract (he has dropped his £200K per week wage demand, he just wants the same salary (per a shedload of articles wherein Arsenal was whinging about his £120K per week wages now), so only £12m total, AND a two year contract would mean we could sell him next summer and surely get at least £8-10m or so, so it would be a net wee gain)

[MoroccanBlue 5,375]

At the expense of course of having a winger who averages less than 10 goals a season for two more years.

[Vesper 30,085]

Which was Chelsea’s greatest Premier League title win?

https://theathletic.com/1783053/2020/04/30/which-was-chelseas-best-premier-league-title-win/

Even if Frank Lampard’s rebuild goes entirely to plan, it could be some time before Chelsea win their sixth Premier League title. Manchester City have raised the bar to an unprecedented level under Pep Guardiola, and Jurgen Klopp’s rampant Liverpool are on course to record the greatest title-winning season ever. Neither team looks likely to drop off significantly anytime soon.

In the meantime, Chelsea supporters can treasure the memories of the five times their club has already won the title since the turn of the millennium. Each one has a slightly different flavour: Jose Mourinho’s historic first triumph in 2004-05, the dominant title defence in 2005-06, Carlo Ancelotti’s devastating 103-goal side in 2009-10, above, Mourinho’s glorious encore in 2014-15, and Antonio Conte’s unexpected juggernaut in 2016-17. Which one do you rank as the most impressive?

Any attempt at a forensic comparison is hampered not just by how drastically the landscape of the Premier League has changed in the last 15 years, but also by how many more statistical tools we have to measure performance on the pitch now. Detailed metrics are simply not available for Mourinho’s first spell at Chelsea, and are considerably more limited for Ancelotti’s title winners than they are now. The greatness of those teams can only really be judged on their overall records.

We can, however, make a far more direct comparison between Chelsea’s two most recent runs to the Premier League title — not least because both teams have considerable overlap in terms of key players. Which side should be considered the peak of that cycle, and which season should be regarded as the greater achievement?

Considering how much Mourinho and Conte dislike one another, the stakes are pretty high here. So without any further ado, let’s take a closer look…

The tactics

Mourinho and Conte may have won the Premier League with many of the same key players, but they did it in very different ways.

Chelsea in 2014-15 invariably lined up in a classic 4-2-3-1 formation, with Cesc Fabregas starting alongside Nemanja Matic at the base of a very progressive midfield. Against more dangerous opponents, the Spaniard was sometimes deployed as a No 10 instead of Oscar, with Ramires slotting in next to Matic to provide greater protection for a defence led by John Terry. Cesar Azpilicueta’s conservatism at left-back balanced the tactical freedom given to Eden Hazard in front of him.

Two years later, Conte favoured an imaginative 3-4-3 system. Oscar was sidelined as Hazard and Willian became wide forwards either side of Diego Costa. N’Golo Kante patrolled central midfield with Matic, relegating Fabregas to an impact substitute. Terry and Branislav Ivanovic, stalwarts of Mourinho’s team, were peripheral while Azpilicueta was shifted to the right of a back three. Victor Moses was re-invented as a right wing-back, with summer signing Marcos Alonso on the left.

Mourinho knew what he wanted to do tactically from day one, having played the same system in the 2013-14 season. Conte arrived at Chelsea intending to play 4-2-4, then navigated the opening weeks of the season with 4-3-3. It was only in September, following damaging defeats by Liverpool and Arsenal, that he shifted to the 3-4-3 system that maximised his personnel and gave the rest of the Premier League a problem it couldn’t solve.

Here, the debate is which deserves more credit: Mourinho’s clarity of vision and the effectiveness of his Plan A, or Conte’s tactical creativity in the face of adversity and ability to adapt his tactics on the fly? The latter feels marginally more impressive, if only because it’s so rare.

The fundamentals

Mourinho and Conte both won the Premier League in dominating fashion. Chelsea in 2014-15 claimed the title with three games to spare and racked up 87 points, finishing eight clear of Manchester City. They lost just three times all season and went undefeated at Stamford Bridge. Their success was built on the meanest defence in the division: 32 goals conceded, 17 clean sheets.

At the other end, Mourinho’s side were good rather than great. They scored 73 goals, 10 fewer than City, and the advanced numbers suggest that was pretty much the tally they deserved: while their expected goals (xG) rating was just 64.24, their expected goals on target (xGOT) rating — the metric which factors in how difficult shots are to save — was 71.14.

Under Conte two years later, Chelsea only secured the title with two games to spare, but finished with 93 points, seven clear of closest rivals Tottenham. They lost more times (five) than Mourinho’s team but they also won 30 of their 38 Premier League matches — more than any other champion had managed in the history of the competition up to that point.

Conte’s team conceded 33 goals, the third-best defensive record in the division, but their expected goals against (xGA) rating of 28.62 suggests they were marginally unlucky, and at least on par with Mourinho’s side at that end of the pitch. Their attack, though, is what separates them.

Chelsea scored 85 goals in 2016-17, more than they had managed in any single campaign since Ancelotti’s side netted 103 times en route to the 2009-10 title. Even more remarkably, the advanced attacking numbers for Conte’s team read like some sort of glitch: an xG of 56.76, which only translates to an xGOT of 63.58 when quality of finishing is taken into account.

How do we explain Conte’s team scoring at least 21 goals more than expected? Part of it can be attributed to Chelsea benefiting from some unusually bad opposition defending and goalkeeping, but part of it is also down to how the matches actually played out.

Chelsea in 2016-17 were supreme front-runners who specialised in getting themselves into winning positions, then closing things out. They scored more goals (12) in the opening 15 minutes of games than any other team in the division and, overall, scored first in 29 of their 38 matches. Conte’s team rarely attacked with full intensity for 90 minutes and, once ahead, they generally favoured managing the lead over gunning for more goals.

As a result, their xG value is not fully reflective of how dangerous their attack was — in the same way that Usain Bolt’s winning time for a 100-metre sprint doesn’t tell the full story of his superiority if he coasts to the finish line once he realises he’s got the race won.

Beyond the number of goals scored, it seems clear that Chelsea in 2016-17 were a significantly better attacking side than two years earlier. But what about the individuals?

The key men

Costa hit 20 Premier League goals in both 2014-15 and 2016-17, but that is pretty much where the similarity between the two best seasons of his Chelsea career ends. A lingering hamstring injury limited him to just 26 appearances in the league on Mourinho’s title run, and he played almost 1,000 fewer minutes (2,111) than he managed at the point of Conte’s attack two years later (3,101).

That, of course, makes his production under Mourinho much more impressive. Costa comfortably outperformed his xG in both title-winning campaigns, but his xG per 90 minutes of 0.61 in 2014-15 was considerably better than in 2016-17 (0.46), highlighting how much more consistently dangerous he was.

It’s tempting to wonder how different the story might have been had Costa not fallen out with Conte amid the possibility of a move to China in January 2017. Prior to the training ground row, he had scored 14 goals in 19 Premier League matches and was clearly the most impactful player in England. In his 16 league appearances after the row, he netted six times, and often looked disinterested.

Hazard came up big for Conte as Costa faded, scoring seven goals in 11 Premier League matches between the start of March and the end of May. Overall he netted 16 times on the run to the 2016-17 title, the best league tally of his Chelsea career (though one he matched in his final season at Stamford Bridge under Maurizio Sarri two years later). But the Belgian still regards 2014-15 as his best Chelsea season, and it’s easy to see why.

In addition to 14 league goals, he also contributed nine assists, four more than he managed in 2016-17. Assists are not always the most reliable measure of a player’s impact, but Hazard’s expected assists per 90 minutes (xA90) was 0.30 in 2014-15, but 0.19 in 2016-17, reinforcing the idea that he was less of a creative influence on Conte’s team.

Fabregas was the creative hub of both teams and he presents the most interesting comparison, primarily because his role changed most significantly. In 2014-15 he was the ever-present conductor of Mourinho’s midfield, playing 2,895 minutes. Two years later under Conte, he spent much less time on the pitch — 1,294 minutes, with 16 of his 29 appearances coming from the bench — but was transformed into one of the most effective impact substitutes the Premier League has seen.

Mourinho brought out Fabregas’ last great season as a starter. He racked up 18 assists, the highest single-season tally of his Premier League career and only two shy of Thierry Henry’s competition record. Beyond that, his job was to set the tempo and direction of Chelsea’s possession while Matic focused more on the midfield dirty work. It was a masterful balance.

Two years later under Conte, Fabregas played in bursts. Introduced in the second half as games were becoming stretched, his passing range and vision became more valuable than ever. He registered 12 assists with an xA90 rating of 0.55, compared to 0.32 under Mourinho. He also averaged 4.2 chances created per 90 minutes, up from 3.0 per 90 minutes in 2014-15.

Fabregas as an impact substitute was the ultimate ace up the sleeve for Conte, and one he could only enjoy because of the signing of Kante from Leicester in the summer of 2016. The addition of a peerless midfield destroyer completely changed the look of Chelsea’s team, compensating for a decline in Matic’s form, as well as generating more valuable opportunities to attack in transition.

Marginally, Mourinho eked more out of Chelsea’s best players as individuals, but under Conte they formed the core of a superior team — in no small part because of Kante.

The context — and the conclusion

Mourinho returned to Chelsea in the summer of 2013 tasked with turning a new group of players into winners. He came remarkably close to winning the Premier League without an elite striker in his first season, and the additions of Matic, Fabregas and Costa subsequently pushed them over the top in impressive style — at least for the first six months of 2014-15.

Conte took over a Chelsea squad with recent winning pedigree, but also a group scarred by the disastrous unravelling of the Mourinho era. He revived Costa and Hazard, made Kante rather than Fabregas the hub of his team and crafted an unorthodox system that maximised many of the other players at his disposal, changing their positions where necessary.

Chelsea led the Premier League for 274 days in 2014-15, more than any other side in the competition’s history up to that point. Mourinho’s side started fast and maintained their charge as a chasing City faded and even as their own energy levels dipped, grinding out a series of ugly victories in the spring to close out the race.

Conte’s records are even more impressive: in addition to the 30 games won and 85 goals scored, the 13-match win streak from September to January was a spectacular validation of his tactical adjustment. By the time Premier League opponents had come up with anything to counter his 3-4-3, it was far too late to stop Chelsea.

Both coaches exploited windows opened by Chelsea’s rivals. Mourinho’s closest challenger was an ageing City side in need of fresh legs and new ideas. Conte was able to seize the moment while City were finding their way under Guardiola and Klopp was still building at Liverpool. Mauricio Pochettino’s bright young Tottenham team were the biggest threat, and they weren’t quite ready.

It must be noted that Mourinho’s 2014-15 title triumph was achieved alongside a Champions League campaign — albeit one ended by Paris Saint-Germain at the first knockout stage — and a League Cup win. His team played 54 matches, seven more than Conte navigated in winning the Premier League and reaching the FA Cup final. Those midweeks free from European competition in the autumn of 2016 undoubtedly helped Chelsea by the time spring of 2017 rolled around.

Ultimately though, 2016-17 still edges it. Mourinho, as he so memorably reminded Chelsea fans who called him “Judas” after a feisty return to Stamford Bridge as Manchester United boss in March 2017, is still the club’s No 1 manager. Conte, however, masterminded the more impressive achievement in 2016-17 — and Chelsea’s declining fortunes since have only underlined how remarkable it was.

[Vesper 30,085]

The Younghusbands: From Chelsea to Philippines icons because of Football Manager

https://theathletic.com/1788485/2020/05/02/chelsea-younghusbands-john-terry-philippines/

In the age of the virtual quiz, here’s a question that would grace any sports round: which brothers born in England have each earned more than 100 international caps?

The answer is Phil and James Younghusband, two Chelsea academy graduates who brushed off disappointment in England to become football superstars in the Philippines, playing key roles in one of the most fruitful decades in the history of the country’s national team.

It is a remarkable story and one made possible by their mother Susan’s decision to move from Manila to London in 1985. There she met Philip Younghusband, a chartered accountant and the man she married. They had three children: James and Phil, two football-mad sons born only 11 months apart, and a daughter named Kerry.

Yearly summer holidays to the Philippines and some traditional Filipino cuisine ensured the Younghusband brothers always treasured their dual heritage but Susan also embraced English sporting culture. “She got more into football because that’s all we’d watch,” James tells The Athletic. “Her pronunciation of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Tottenham made us laugh.”

James and Phil grew up supporting Manchester United but Chelsea made the biggest impression and ultimately won the battle to sign them as coveted youngsters in 1997. “Gianluca Vialli was still the manager,” Phil recalls. “The first time we went to Harlington for training, I remember the scout who found us telling us, ‘You just missed the manager hitting golf balls’.”

Their football education at Chelsea gave the brothers front-row seats for the most transformative years in the club’s history. “Frank Sinclair was still playing right-back for Chelsea when we first got there,” Phil adds. “I remember him coming out to his car carrying all of his stuff in a black bag (when he was sold to Leicester in 1998).”

They first found out about Roman Abramovich’s takeover watching CNN while on holiday in the Philippines with their parents in the summer of 2003. “We went through the whole transition when Roman came in,” Phil says. “It was nice to see something fresh and new but it was also sad to see old faces leave. It was a really interesting time and it all happened so fast.”

“We were doing pre-season, which was a lot of running back then, and week after week, there were more big signings and the papers were constantly linking Chelsea with players,” James adds. “It was exciting. There was obviously a lot more competition but the advantage was we got to watch these players and learn from them.”

As the older brother, James — a right midfielder who modelled his game on David Beckham — was first to get a taste of training with the seniors. He hasn’t forgotten the time he was paired with Juan Sebastian Veron. “He was a really nice guy,” he says. “I remember one time, he nutmegged me. I tried to get him back and he saw it coming and laughed.

“I beat him in the one-on-one game with one goalkeeper, but in his mind he was only trying to get his fitness back. I had something to prove. We talked afterwards about his time in Manchester. He was a really nice guy. You don’t realise until afterwards how lucky you are to be in those situations.”

James also got a taste of working under Jose Mourinho. “He was encouraging but he’d always keep you on your toes. I remember I tried to get out of one tight situation and he said, ‘No, James. That’s not the place to do it’. You really wanted to impress him because he was always watching. Even the captain of the club, John Terry, would be switched on when we were doing rondos.

“He set the standard so high and we could see that even he wanted to impress Mourinho. It lifted the whole squad. I was a youngster exposed to that and it really helped me in my career.”

Both brothers were still getting their game time in Chelsea’s academy and reserve teams. Aware of their Filipino heritage, some of their team-mates encouraged them to declare for the Philippines.

“They said we should do it, that we’d be on billboards over there, and we just laughed,” James says. “We didn’t take it seriously because we didn’t know much about Philippines football until we googled it. The PFF (Philippine Football Federation) had a good website and we found out they at least had a national team but we didn’t know how we’d go about it.”

Only two weeks after that conversation in 2005, head of youth development Neil Bath presented the brothers with some unexpected news: the PFF had been in touch, having been alerted to James and Phil’s potential eligibility by a teenage Chelsea fan who had spotted their dual nationality while playing Football Manager. They jumped at the chance.

“A bit later, after we qualified for the Southeast Asian Championship, we went to a bar to celebrate and there was this kid who was 15 or 16 years old,” Phil says. “He was very shy but he did say he was the one who found us on the game. I was very thankful to him.

“We loved Football Manager. I think James liked to put ourselves in the Chelsea team. I just played normally but it took up a lot of our time at that age.”

Having dropped outside the top 200 in the FIFA rankings in the early 2000s, the PFF launched a fresh drive to bring more foreign-born talent into the Philippines national side. Chad Gould, who played his youth career at Bournemouth and Southampton, and the Greatwich brothers — Chris, Phil and Simon — were also part of the English influx but the Younghusbands were the headline recruits.

James and Phil first trained with the Philippines national team in the summer of 2005. Chelsea academy team-mate Jimmy Smith, on holiday in the country, joined them for the session to keep up his fitness. It was rainy season and a far cry from the plush facilities at Cobham.

“There was a brick on the field and people throwing javelins close by,” James says. “It was quite a compact sports facility. We changed at the side of the pitch. The thing I struggled with was the humidity. I couldn’t breathe. I was too busy trying to get my breath back to run and the local players really gained my respect.”

Both brothers were included in the Philippines squad for the 2005 Southeast Asian Games. “It was different,” Phil says. “We had to drive an hour to where the team was staying, up in the mountains in Bacolod. It was a lovely big white house but, every time we had to train it was a two-hour round trip to the stadium. Security was the armed forces with their AK-47 rifles sitting next to us.”

The rest of the players agreed to give the Younghusbands the only TV in the house so they could binge watch Lost between training sessions. There were also singing and acting competitions to help the diverse squad bond ahead of the tournament. “The thing that kept us there was how nice everyone was,” James says.

Football is the main sport in Bacolod, the Filipino province that hosted the tournament, and the strength of passion took the brothers by surprise. “There were people climbing up trees just to get to the games,” Phil says. “Outside the gates, there were thousands of people just waiting. Coming from Chelsea reserve games to playing in front of 30,000 sold-out crowds was amazing.

“The president of the Philippines came to watch the last game and we had to go up and shake his hand. It felt like we were in the FA Cup final.”

James scored his first international goal against Cambodia in the second game, a 30-yard shot that arrowed into the bottom corner. Phil, the striker and more frequent goalscorer, opened his account with two headers against Malaysia. “Filipinos don’t cheer — they scream,” he says. “It was a very high-pitched stadium but it was a wonderful feeling.”

Both brothers quickly came to regard their international adventures with the Philippines as a welcome change of pace from the day-to-day battle to break into the Chelsea first team but their paths soon diverged for the first time. James was released when his contract expired in the summer of 2006, plunging him into the perilous world of life as a triallist in English football’s lower leagues.

“By the time James’ contract ran out, we’d been at Chelsea for almost 10 years,” Phil says. “For those 10 years, every time I’d been to Chelsea, I’d gone with my brother. Every single time. So the first pre-season when I had to go on my own felt very weird.”

James had trials at clubs across the country as well as stints with AFC Wimbledon and his local side, Staines Town. Chelsea’s technical director Frank Arnesen at the time even arranged a trial with Dutch club Den Bosch but nothing panned out. “It was a big lesson for me that if you go to a football club, you need to do your homework as a trialist,” he says.

“You need to find out if the coach is looking for the type of player you are and if the team is looking for your position specifically. Even if you’re better than the player they already have, it’s very unlikely they’re going to take him out because he’s already contracted and has a good relationship with them.

“I needed a bit of a break from football, so I did some other things in London. I did a bit of modelling, a bit of TV work. It even got to the point where I was picking up cars from people who couldn’t afford to pay for them anymore, just for some extra money. It was a good learning experience for me of how the football system worked.”

Phil, meanwhile, was still trying to glean everything he could from Chelsea. “Jose would ask me about the Philippines: the culture, the football, how everything was,” he says. “I had a few conversations with Didier Drogba and he was always nice. He’d speak about Africa and I’d speak about Asia, and we’d compare.

“I had more conversations with the English boys – John Terry, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole. I could have gone on loan to LA Galaxy and Joe Cole was saying it would be a good move. That was about a month before David Beckham went there.

“I remember practising free kicks with Arjen Robben at the end of one session. I think it was his last day before he went to Real Madrid. It was very windy and I hit one that was going well wide but it came back and ended up going in off the crossbar. He just said, ‘Phil, go in. End on that one’.”

By the time his own contract at Chelsea expired in 2008, the struggles of his older brother had convinced Phil that the Philippines offered more in the way of opportunity than England – and thanks to the profile the Younghusbands had generated through their exploits for the national team, those opportunities stretched beyond football.

“We were able to get some modelling jobs and endorsements,” he says. “I even did a singing competition similar to X Factor (called Celebrity Duets). They got professionals from different industries; I was the athlete, there was a politician, a newspaper columnist and so on. We partnered with different local professional singers for a duet each week and then the public voted.

“There were eight contestants and I was the fourth voted off. I sang Umbrella by Rihanna and a few others. Maybe that kept me in — not my actual singing; my song choice!”

But the peak of the Younghusbands’ fame in the Philippines was still to come. The family had settled in the country by the time the 2010 Suzuki Cup rolled around and both brothers were able to play a key role in the most glorious moment in the national team’s modern history.

The Philippines had only just qualified for the tournament with a fortuitous 0-0 draw against Cambodia and were rank outsiders in a group that featured defending champions Vietnam, Singapore and Myanmar. Preparations for the competition were less than ideal.

“We did a camp in Thailand and the last game we played before the tournament was against a Thai club team,” Phil says. “We had to drive three hours there but the bus was late, which meant we only arrived 10 minutes before kick-off. We had to get changed in the bus, run out, warm up for 10 minutes and then play. We ended up losing 9-0. I think they were second or third division!”

But the tournament itself followed a very different script. James set up Chris Greatwich for a last-minute equaliser against Singapore in the opening group game to pave the way for an even bigger shock against Vietnam — a match still remembered in the Philippines as “The Miracle in Hanoi”.

Vietnam had beaten Myanmar 7-1 in their opening group game and the commentator predicted a cricket score. But the Philippines held them at bay, thanks to some heroic defending and spectacular saves from Neil Etheridge, the former Chelsea youth goalkeeper that the Younghusbands had helped to recruit to the national side.

The game was an ordeal for Phil for other reasons. “The night before the Vietnam game, I didn’t sleep at all,” he says. “I was on the toilet, I was vomiting. I went down for breakfast and could only have a bit of a banana before going back to bed. I had a bit of a temperature and it was clear I had food poisoning.

“It was a question of whether I felt up to playing or not but going to the game and seeing the stadium filling up; the adrenaline took over. I felt I was OK to play.”

He did more than just play. Vietnam poured forward after Greatwich had given the Philippines a surprise lead shortly before half-time, leaving space for Phil to lead a counter-attack and score the decisive second goal with 11 minutes to go. “After I score, you can see me touching my stomach and telling the coach that I don’t feel well,” he says. “I felt dehydrated and I was cramping up. Getting that goal made me feel like I’d done part of my job.

“There are videos on YouTube of everyone celebrating in the changing room after the game and the camera pans to see me vomiting in the bathroom.”

Vietnam did not take the defeat well, switching the lights off in the away dressing room. “They were so angry that when we got into the changing room, they told us to get out,” James says. “They kicked us out of the stadium — we weren’t even allowed to shower!”

The result left Philippines needing only a point from their final group game against Myanmar to reach the knockout stage for the first time ever. They got it and the impact back home was seismic. “The responses on Twitter were overwhelming,” Phil says. “We arrived back in the Philippines and the amount of media was what you’d get for a Manny Pacquiao fight.

“We had the press conference in the airport when we landed and there were hundreds of cameras. It was something we’d never seen before and that was the point we realised we’d done something special. We trained in Manila ahead of the semi-finals and the stand was sold out for the session.”

The adventure ended in the semi-finals but interest in football spiked in the Philippines as a result. Fresh investment flooded into the United Football League (UFL), founded in 2009, and the brothers turned down a lucrative offer from Indonesian club Jakarta FC in order to help it grow.

Both have played their club football in the Philippines ever since and almost always for the same teams. Unlike many brothers split apart by professional football, they have always been inclined to stick together. “That’s just always worked for us,” James says. “Some people have asked us, ‘Why don’t you separate?’ and we always said, ‘Why, though?’. My brother and I are best friends. I was best man at his wedding last year.

“We’ve done everything together and we were even in the same year at school. Our mum and dad always wanted it that way, so it made sense to keep doing that.”

Their chemistry extends to the football pitch; Phil estimates that James has played a part in setting up around a third of his 52 international goals — a tally that makes him the Philippines’ all-time record goalscorer. “In our school team, I’d take up a Thierry Henry position on the left,” he says.

“James was playing on the right and would do a long diagonal between the right-back and centre-back. I’d run in between them and got a lot of my goals that way.

“James’ strengths are his crossing and his energy to get up and down. I’m a striker, so naturally, I’m in the box. He knows what runs I’m going to make and we’ve had that understanding in all our teams.”

Both were ever-present throughout the 2010s as the Philippines attained their highest-ever FIFA ranking of 111, recorded their first-ever win in World Cup qualifying and reached the group stage of the Asian Cup for the first time in their history in 2019. That tournament was Phil’s swansong before retirement and it was not a happy one under new coach Sven-Goran Eriksson.

“He went for a more defensive shape, which meant he changed everything that we’d been doing before,” Phil says. “He played 5-4-1, which meant my role as a No 10 didn’t fit into the system, so my last games for the national team weren’t the most memorable.

“He’s what you see on the TV: very softly spoken, very nice, very polite. I got on well with him, but I felt he changed everything that had worked for us within five minutes of coming in. He hadn’t been able to work with the team long enough. His contract was only for three or four months. We were very amicable but in terms of what he brought to the Asian Cup, it didn’t make sense to me.”

Phil, now 32, retired on 108 international appearances, and has returned to England with his pregnant wife to raise their son. James, 33, on 101 caps, is still in Manila and isn’t ready to hang up his boots just yet. Both want to continue helping to raise the profile and the quality of football in the Philippines, working with investors to build on the soccer school they opened early in their international careers.

“I’d like to coach but I don’t want to get straight into it,” James says. “But I also love movies and I’d like to see how that industry works. I’d love to do a road trip across the US. I want to explore other cultures and other interests, but I’ll always be involved in football.”

Phil intends to take a different path. “I want to grow in football and if I want to be educated, I can’t be in the Philippines right now,” he says. “I need to be in a European country where I can learn and grow, and one day bring that back. I think I can help the Philippines — not so much on the coaching side but more the economics, the marketing, the organisation and the structure.

“If there’s any way I can be around a club and see how it’s structured, then I can bring that back and really help football in the Philippines.”

They both still follow Chelsea and have watched Lampard’s youth revolution with delight this season. “I really want them to qualify for the Champions League and see what they build when they start signing players again,” James says. “I’m sure he’ll get the right balance.

“I see some of the first team posting flashback photos on social media in their academy gear and I remember wearing that gear. It makes me feel much older! They were little kids when I was in my teenage years. Your career goes so fast.”

[BXL70 396]

Why do Chelsea do not put on sales mouth masks with our club colors like other europeans clubs?

Example: https://www.rsca.be/fr/mouthmasks

[Jase 43,479]

1 hour ago, BXL70 said:

Why do Chelsea do not put on sales mouth masks with our club colors like other europeans clubs?

Example: https://www.rsca.be/fr/mouthmasks

Making profit of face masks? We would be better off producing them for the health care workers. 

[Jase 43,479]

 

[BXL70 396]

On 5/3/2020 at 8:42 PM, Jason said:

Making profit of face masks? We would be better off producing them for the health care workers. 

Profits would be for the NHS.