Siidi

I would even suggest we give him an extension. It never stopped any manager from being sacked (if he performed badly) It's just hard to imagine him carrying on without an extension, a dead man walking. Strangely enough, he became more animated on the touchline, and the team played better, the louder the speculation about him being replaced. So, I would not be surprised if he put his feet up and lit the cigar once given an extension.

That's the question. Some of our supporters have argued that returning to our glory days will take several seasons and managers. Pochettino should be given the chance to prove them wrong, perhaps.

I suspect many of us would not accept that it's not a simple binary choice of good v bad when judging a manager. Somewhere in the spectrum of good managers is a Mauricio Pochettino line. The question is how far away from the bad end and how thick that line is. Is he good enough to coach Chelsea,? - Yes, most probably. If he the manager to take us back to our PL and European glory days? - I don't think so. Should he be given more time? - One more season to prove the doubters wrong. Moreover, If he goes now, he'll become that great manager that would have won us a dozen PL and CL trophies. It's fair to say we're stuck with Pochettino for at least one more season, for better or for worse.

I like his abilities on the ball. The only negative is that when we were down to 10, he could have put more pressure on the opponent when the ball returned to them

That was a brilliant away performance. We clearly learned from the Forest game. I don't half mind Europa League next season if we can make it.

I was really excited about his prospects at the start of the season. Maybe he's trying too hard and too early to be everything. He should focus on his defending especially as we are sipping in too many far post goals

Defending set pieces is not always about having the best defenders. Drogba was good at tracking his man and heading away corners, but he played under managers who knew what the players must do in those situations, instructed them and saw that they carried it out. We can blame Nicolas Jackson for allowing Boli a free run at the ball, but our defending issues are more systemic. The blame is squarely at Pochettino's feet, I'm afraid.

I can see how some aspects of our attacking being improved by signing a No 9 of quality. Our lack of organisation in defence however cannot be corrected by new signings. And if Pochettino hasn't figured out all season how to fix it, I doubt he will fix it next season.

The team is improving for sure. We also need the manager to improve. Another manager might have sent the team flying off the block this afternoon considering we had so much time to prepare and rest, and considering what's at stake. We're still clueless about how to defend our far post. The manager must improve If these parts of our game is to get better next season.

Isn't that the problem, that some people expect a winger to run at players regardless of the situation? CHO is a top all round player who reads the game; knows when to run at players, when to pass, and when to shoot. His "upgrade" Madueke spent all afternoon trying to run at players and losing the ball each time. He looked half the player of CHO in second gear. I know that on a good day, Madueke is a top winger. This afternoon showed what happens when you try too hard to run at the FB unnecessarily when your opponents sit back and your team is not transitioning fast. The harder you try the worse it gets.

Exactly. You'd think we played 48 hrs ago.

From a quality player.

Another great performance. Whatever people think of Noni's abilities, he is a player who makes the right decisions with the ball, and in this situation, it was a pass to Jackson. I put my hands up about giving up on Pochettino before the last three games. But at least I had followed him for many years. I find it harder after a few games to give up on a young player I hardly know, a player who had been scouted not only by Chelsea. I always refused to believe that Madueke, Badiashile, Gusto, or even Cucurella were as bad as some people were making of them. Badiashile's timing of interception was brilliant all afternoon.

I would just be happy to see us successfully deal with different kinds of team - top teams, relegation strugglers, mid+table scrappers, etc. That is what good coaching is all about - you want a fight, we're up for it, you want to pass, let's go If ECL is where we emd up, so be it. We can look to something better next season .

Congratulations to Pochettino and the team for a good performance and a well-deserved win. The owners can't stop the speculation, and they didn't start it in the first place. The football public is entitled to judge the performance of any player or manager. Our next match is against West Ham. It will present an entirely different kind of challenge to the manager and the team. They will sit deep and try to hit us on the counter, and they will do that for 90+ minutes. Pochettino has done okay against big and big(ish) teams. The WHam match is the kind he can use to silence the speculations. If we fumble, then the win against Spurs would not have changed many people's perceptions of Pochettino.

I have a lot of respect for the Economist. But I am never reverential of any journal or journalist. This article is so flawed it's not even worth discussing. Their key argument is that if you change a manager and keep the same players , results remain the same. In other words, managers don't improve results, players do. There is a concept of spurious association in statistics, where two events occur together but one is not responsible for the other. Unai Emery improved Villa by getting their existing players to play better. He also signed a couple of players. You have to be both a poor statistician and a pretty hopeless football follower to not notice that their results improved without new signings. The author could have avoided the fallacy by asking themselves, what happens when a club keeps a failing manager and sign more prayers. In most cases , they don't improve, in some they get even worse results. Trying to shore up a poor manager with new signings is a fast route to bankrupt a club you'd think the Economist would know this. If the Saudi had not come into the market, Chelsea would be in a much worse financial situation today due to desperate signings by the previous managers. Pochettino doesn't have to moan about his players because the football press is busy doing it for him. Just watch someone ask him about his own responsibility for his team's inconsistency and see the excuses fly out.

Which is why The Economist should stick to economics. I am even happier now that I ended my subscription to it. The little I have read of the article is full of self-contradictions. Of course, Klopp then made a brilliant player of the Egyptian winger, the same winger who did so-so under his previous managers. I cannot see how that diminishes the importance of a manager. If anything, it showed that a brilliant manager can make something of what he is being given. Instead of Klopp moaning about not getting Julian Brandt, he got on with the job. Put a different manager in the same equation, and all you would ever hear is how the board signed the wrong players, blah, blah, blah, hence our poor performances. Sounds familiar?

I think Leon Bailey was already at Villa when Unai Emery arrived.

Leon Bailey is in and out. A decent player like the other two. But they are not the reason Villa are playing better under Unai Emery, if you ask me. It's the improvement in the players that were classed as useless under Gerrard.

My point was, it was sir Alex that made the difference,churning out results whatever happened in or around Man Utd. It was a similar situation at Chelsea where Romam Abramovich was praised as maker one season, derided as the breaker the next. It's the manager stupid Football clubs owner's actions are fodder to football talk radio. It's not a discussion I take particularly seriously. Choice of manager is a different matter. One thing that baffles me about Pochettino is the impression he goes that "it's all happening to us", like, 'when we're good, we're really good, when we're bad, we're really bad'. the kind of comment you expect from someone from the stand, not from a head coach. The reason you play well against a big team only to lose or draw against a bottom team is your lack physical and mental preparation of your team, FULLSTOP

Those big performances against big teams show what the team is capable of., the best response to those who say the team is not good enough. If they're good enough to take on ManCity, they're good enough for me. Now league position is a different matter. It's about consistency, the ability to navigate tricky fixtures, to adapt to different oppositions, big and small, to cope with injuries and suspension, how you use your squad to solve problems - all those tricky stuff you expect the coaching team to solve. The team will get better in the long term, with or without Pochettino But playing well and finding a win in a tricky fixture or thinking on your feet (quite literally) are completely different things. I don't think Pochettino has the latter, with all due respect.

You left out one person(s), the owners. He also takes the blame for buying the wrong kind of players, but only when we lose. I'm with you; the manager should take credit just as he takes the blame. The big question is whether this zig-zagging along is getting us somewhere, even if you give 100% of the credit to Pochettino. Is this good enough even at this stage?

I think you may be asking the wrong question. Just ask why Man Utd of today is not as successful as that of 14 years ago, and if Jim Ratcliffe would improve their performance if he kept Erik Ten Hag.

It is funny how so much blame has been laid at the owners' feet when it is statistically clear that changing a manager makes the most significant difference in a team's performance. Roman Abramovich was called all sorts of names - interfering, clueless, anti-football, wasteful, every time the team underperformed. Yet, the next season, a manager turns up and wins a big trophy with the same squad, and there is silence but only until performance drops, and it's Abramovich's fault again. The strongest evidence that the Chelsea squad is weak comes from its performance under Pochettino, just as Steven Gerrard showed that Villa's squad was poor until Unai Emery turned up and showed that their squad was good. I rest my case.

I agree, nothing is easy in life or football. That is why we need a capable manager. I can't think of a single player that has improved under Pochettino, honestly speaking. Cole Palmer was good from the start, just in case you're thinking of him.