comment by JohnTerrysHardTackle - #Lampard211 (U1634)
posted 42 minutes ago
comment by The Chavy One (U12176)
posted 36 seconds ago
Top 4 wasn't lost yesterday, It was lost against Bournemouth and Watford IMO.

I think next season with a couple of additions we will turn the Burnley, Palace, West Ham, Bournemouth and Watford defeats into wins.. Its the results against the smaller sides which really determine where in the table you end up.

Its imperative we have a good transfer window.
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You’re right, but yesterday just made it obvious how far off the top 4 we are in reality. After Eriksen’s strike, we wilted totally.
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We have wilted a lot this season. Arsenal and United to name a few. The club has made no long term succession planning for the known departures of players like Terry Lamps. Drogba etc.

We now have a squad worse than the on that Roman first inherited. Shocking statement on his or his management team’s running of the club.

I think what the club does this summer will tell us if Roman has taken us as far as we can go or if we need new ownership. My gut feeling is the latter. Everything has a cycle and it just might be that after 15 or so years, Roman’s is nearly over.

comment by SWTN - Judas is number 1 (U7916)
posted 46 seconds ago
comment by JohnTerrysHardTackle - #Lampard211 (U1634)
posted 42 minutes ago
comment by The Chavy One (U12176)
posted 36 seconds ago
Top 4 wasn't lost yesterday, It was lost against Bournemouth and Watford IMO.

I think next season with a couple of additions we will turn the Burnley, Palace, West Ham, Bournemouth and Watford defeats into wins.. Its the results against the smaller sides which really determine where in the table you end up.

Its imperative we have a good transfer window.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You’re right, but yesterday just made it obvious how far off the top 4 we are in reality. After Eriksen’s strike, we wilted totally.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We have wilted a lot this season. Arsenal and United to name a few. The club has made no long term succession planning for the known departures of players like Terry Lamps. Drogba etc.

We now have a squad worse than the on that Roman first inherited. Shocking statement on his or his management team’s running of the club.

I think what the club does this summer will tell us if Roman has taken us as far as we can go or if we need new ownership. My gut feeling is the latter. Everything has a cycle and it just might be that after 15 or so years, Roman’s is nearly over.
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The first step, surely, is to appoint a replacement for Emenalo who, for all the criticism, was part of the scouting team that recruited Salah, De Bruyne, Courtois for peanuts. Our recruitment recently has been far worse.

I can’t see Roman leaving, the stadium rebuild seems like a long term commitment.

At the ground yesterday, to many of our players showed defeated body language after going 2 1 down. I knew then we were done. We don’t have leaders and fighters anymore (Kante excluded) who is basically a one man midfield and utterly brilliant.

Agree Biggish

In a nutshell Biggish,we have only a one-man midfield ! and I'm still not overly enamoured with Chistensen yet !,he still has a lot to learn.

comment by SWTN - Judas is number 1 (U7916)
posted 9 minutes ago
At the ground yesterday, to many of our players showed defeated body language after going 2 1 down. I knew then we were done. We don’t have leaders and fighters anymore (Kante excluded) who is basically a one man midfield and utterly brilliant.
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Spot on

"My view is that it’s the strategy of the people above the manager which needs to be called into question. We have been successful in the past by planning for short termism, which was fine when we had a group of real leaders like Terry, Lamps etc but won’t work with this current crop so we need to look longer term. "

Yeh whenever i've called for stability and people have used the

"manager merry-go-round has worked and there's been no need to change as it has proven successful."

have ignored that we had the best spine the club has had in its history so. So much so they almost made Avram Grant look a good manager.

The problem lies with whoever has decided what players we are targeting over the last few years. I don't buy the argument about a lack of spending. The problem has been that a lot of the time we have been throwing money at the wrong targets. 40 mill should get you a hell of a lot more than what Bakayoko offers. We don't seem to have any leaders in this team and we noticeably don't work as hard as other good teams like Spurs did yesterday.

Call me old-school if you like but I think that the Manager should decide on the targets to fit in with the way he wants to play so that he stands or falls on his own decisions and then rightly carries the can if it doesn't work out, but we seem to have a panel above him who seem to think that they know more about Football than he does. If that is the case then perhaps they should just appoint themselves as the Manager rather than employing the professionals?

Summer

Bang on about spending, completely my point.

I think what the club have tried to do is have a consistent transfer policy with the understanding that the manager would fit in with it, no matter who was in charge.

Conte appears to have felt that he should get more of a say after winning the league last year and been disappointed when the club have stood firm and we’ve ended up with a very poor pair of transfer windows.

1 Not strengthening in summer...again after being champions

2 not buying Vardy in January

3 Conte's inability to see what is in front of him...in fab baka moses to name three just not being up to the task

4 awful at substitutions....leaves it too late...puts the wrong ones on


Take your pick

For me the one transfer that sums up the ludicrous transfer system we have, is the signing of Zappacosta.

Nothing personal against the bloke but he's an average player, signed basically as cover for Moses and some one deemed that paying in excess of £20m for him was acceptable.

Would it not have been better to have used Sterling or James for the same purpose?

I have a feeling that if some one at the club had a bit of vision one of those two could have turned out better than the hapless Moses!

JTHT, agree with that mate. Conte has not been blameless this year and for me has over-made his perfectly valid point, which may have transferred to the players that we do have, but the main point is that the Club needs to seriously look at itself about how we are conducting our transfer policy.

We need Terry and Lamps back ASAP. They need roles working with the first team and young players. Othwerwise I don’t see where our next generation of leaders are going’s to come from.

That's very true biggish. Even though he didn't play last year you could see the influence of John Terry behind the scenes running through that team that got over the line last year. It probably has been missed this year which is why at times we have looked quite mentally weak at times.

Am I the only one who wouldn't mind Jody taking over the first team? Hes doing great things with the younger team and they have a very specific way of playing, Something incredibly pur first team doesn't have.

Jody in charge with Lamps as his assistant... Two proper Chelsea men who know what it means to play for the shirt.

comment by The Chavy One (U12176)
posted 2 minutes ago
Am I the only one who wouldn't mind Jody taking over the first team? Hes doing great things with the younger team and they have a very specific way of playing, Something incredibly pur first team doesn't have.

Jody in charge with Lamps as his assistant... Two proper Chelsea men who know what it means to play for the shirt.
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I’ve seen this suggested a few times and I wouldn’t be totally against it, considering he’d do what I’m saying and give the squad roles to young players.

The concern would be that our youth team set up is so successful, they make any manager look good.

comment by Kunta Kinte Kante Conte (U1641)
posted 1 hour, 57 minutes ago
Where did it go wrong? It started from last season with potentially this culture that if you win the league nothing much needs to be done. I know it's common opinion now but in the midst of when we won the league if you suggested trying to improve on the likes of Moses, Alonso, Willian/Pedro, there'd be a lot of vitriol directed your way. The team did very well last season but it was also clear, like with Leicester, we were performing above ourselves, at least for me. You could tell (again, like with Leicester), which starting XI players probably weren't actually that good and who the actual, top quality, good enough to start for a title challenging club were. You could also see we did have some good factors that undeniably helped us - no Europe the major one. Like with Leicester we sat on are laurels, kind of did a half hearted attempt at improving the team and no surprise, team goes back to performing at the level they should be at. Depends on how highly you rate our squad - but I think we are only 5-6 points off where we 'should' be ie scraping top four.

As you said with Conte's squad management, this kind of lack of progression in the squad can also be linked to how he treats squad members. There's squad players he uses and squad players he doesn't, and no wonder Ake and Chalobah left. PL standard footballers who will only improve and cost us zilch.
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Tbh I would have been one of those fans who was content enough with the starting eleven and squad after the title win.

I feel our failure was mostly to do with letting good players go (either on loan or sold). With RLC, Ake and Chalobah all leaving for more game time, we were kind of left with finding "squad player" replacements to cover the starting eleven, rather than focusing more time on signing players who would definitely improve the first team. We spent most of the summer trying to sign cover players, for the squad players we let go.

However, my biggest concern is that many of our biggest stars are not reliable enough, and not effective in the biggest moments. I can excuse Moses, Alonso and Drinkwater for average performances, but the likes of Hazard, Fabregas, Willian, Cahill and Courtios are so unreliable. We really should be concerned how often these players form will drop drastically through periods. I really do not see how they can be excused tbh, as they have proved they are more than capable.

Cha av, thats not a bad (but brave) shout. Morris has been doing some great work with the young-uns and with a wise and seasoned campaigner like Lampard at his side the players could respond to that.

However the Club are notoriously led to believe that big names and big reputations are what it is all about so I don't see them being brave or visionary enough to try that, but I like it personally.

Do City, Tottenham or Liverpool see their star players all drop their performances through certain periods like we do? Probably not.

De Bruyne, Eriksen, Kane and Salah are all capable of putting great performances throughout the season. Hazard, Willian, Fabregas, Pedro too often go through parts of the season playing poorly. Moses and Alonso had fairly bad games yesterday, but in someways that's to be expected as they were up against a very good team, but Hazard for example should be expected to at least contribute to the game. Yesterday like too many games over the course of the season, he was way too quiet and playing very safe. As was Fabregas and Willian who contributed next to nothing.

I would actually like to keep Fabregas next season but as long as hes used sporadically like he was in 16/17.

We really need someone in the middle of the park to give Kanté a hand, The fella is brilliant but could you imagine a Wanyama/Dembele alongside him?

I also feel that Christensen is being used an awful lot amd im not sure hes ready to be a starter every game in that CB role, Id like to see Luiz back in there for a stint.

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

What would we do without N'golo ? ,he had to cover the whole midfield by himself ...again !

comment by Sideshow (U11809)
posted 5 minutes ago
While there’s a genuine case for the board being responsible for our second season slumps, I also think you have to look individually at each managers handling of the squad to see that some of them have been just as culpable as well.

From this perspective, I would say that Carlo was the only manager who the board really screwed over. Many of our best players were on the decline and reaching the end of their careers, and none of the academy players he had to work are playing in any of five main first divisions in Europe now. We only attempted signing replacements in January, with one of them being probably our biggest flop.

Mourinho disposed of so many good players during his second spell here, that it’s hard to feel sympathy when we had to continually find squad replacements. Yes Rahman, Djilobodji and Falcao were bad signings, but then again we had De Bruyne, Salah, Lukaku, Mata, Schurrle, Cuadrado and Bertrand.

When it comes to Conte, I do feel that he has been unfortunate that both Morata and Bakayoko have been so underwhelming this season. You could argue that the board signed these players, however these were signings Conte was in favour of as well. If he viewed young players as serious members of the squad, then it would have meant that the board could spend more on a single player than distribute money on a series of mediocre players. I do wonder whether we would have signed Drinkwater, if Conte didn’t want to send Chalobah back on loan.
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Some excellent points there. Can’t say I disagree with any of that at all, I would just say that we’ve ended up with a theme emerging after title wins which means we have to look deeper than just the manager, although I absolutely agree that Jose and Conte have not helped themselves.

comment by harlequinHebdo (U16981)
posted 5 minutes ago
What would we do without N'golo ?,he had to cover the whole midfield by himself ...again !
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Build a new midfield around him ASAP.

Comment deleted by Site Moderator