Middlesbrough 1 Chelsea 0

[east lower]

1 hour ago, xceleryx said:

And sign who exactly? 

That's kinda the other issue here, the alternative options out there are either horrendous overpriced, aren't good enough, talented but also not entirely proven. 

£60-70 million on Ivan Toney would still have people annoyed. £100m+ for Oshimen is highway robbery. 

Then you've got the lad who was at Coventry last season that's now doing well at Sporting, Santiago Gimenez over in Holland, who may end up another Kezman. They're some of the "best" options at present that aren't already at established clubs but would still demand fairly high fees with no real great assurances. 

The pool itself is increasingly shallow.

And any one of them is multiple times better than relying on Broja  - a blind man could see that. And that was before his injury and a year out of playing. 

The same blind man could also see that Nkunku is not and was not a direct replacement as someone who’ll lead your line in the PL.

I have zero faith in the coach, I had little faith in him when appointed but the owners and the faceless football people appointed have not helped him, despite what money they have spent.
 

 

Edited January 10 by east lower

[ROTG]

1 hour ago, xceleryx said:

Then you've got the lad who was at Coventry

The club hire a scout from the championship and hey ho - an ex championship player is all of a sudden a +50m target on the clubs radar... Coincidence?

[ROTG]

3 minutes ago, east lower said:

And any one of them is multiple times better than relying on Broja  - a blind man could see that. And that was before his injury and a year out of playing. 

The same blind man could also see that Nkunku is not and was not a direct replacement as someone who’ll lead your line in the PL.

I have zero faith in the coach, I had little faith in him when appointed but the owners and the faceless football people appointed have not helped him, despite what money they have spent.
 

 

Even a sulking loanee at Roma is better than the current front line options

[east lower]

Just now, ROTG said:

Even a sulking loanee at Roma is better than the current front line options

You said you’d stop this 😉

Temptation, like chips to a tramp (that wasn’t very PC of me now).

[ROTG]

4 minutes ago, east lower said:

You said you’d stop this 😉

Temptation, like chips to a tramp (that wasn’t very PC of me now).

Off to give myself a good shoeing for breaking my word 

[east lower]

10 minutes ago, ROTG said:

Off to give myself a good shoeing for breaking my word 

I cannot condone violence, even self-inflicted - So 2 x Our Fathers & 3 x Hail Mary's should suffice in substitution for a good shoeing!

[Sleeping Dave]

Hey ho. The volatility train keeps huffing along. I’ve said this all season, this side is too young and lacks too many instrumental pieces to be a solid top side. 

I don’t think we should sign a striker in January. I don’t think we should sign a replacement CB for Silva either. Continue and play out the season with what we’ve got and come summer add three instrumental pieces to the side;

A goal scoring striker

A goal scoring wide player

A goal scoring central midfield player

We sorely lack goals and have for years. You can’t be a top side without scoring goals, it really is that simple. 

[Mark Kelly]

8 hours ago, Ham said:

Funny how all of the wingers had a bad night tonight when none of them had any proper overlapping support. 

They were all made to look bad by the set up/coaching. 

 

Ive been shouting this into the wind all season. 

He's a coward and he's actively working to make our players look worse than they are. 

Any coach out there, get Steve Cooper, any one would set them up better. 

[ROTG]

5 minutes ago, Sleeping Dave said:

Hey ho.

We sorely lack goals and have for years. You can’t be a top side without scoring goals, it really is that simple. 

Tally-ho

Fixed 😀

Edited January 10 by ROTG

[patThenevin]

The amount of tosh that has been signed, both in ability and mentality.....yet again Winstanely and Lawro get a pass from the vast majority here.

Imagine spending the obscene amd club future challenging levels we have and not have a good goalie nor forward.

Abject but yeah let's go down the manager scapegoat route. 

The financier stains and their appointments of those two Muppets are where our ire at what is happening at the club should be directed.

No manager in the world will sort out the misaligned and ludicrously expensive flops we have, a club cleansed of any identity and with a massive financial weight around it's neck.......or people putting that on poch too? 

[Holymoly]

10 hours ago, patThenevin said:

Application and desire.....two basic elements of the game, wholly lacking

I wouldn't level that particular criticism at this performance strangely. Rather it comes down to technique, ability and belief in the final third. This may even be down to OVER coaching. In that rather thean being allowed their head when the goal is beckoning they are being instructed to walk the ball into the net in a specific fashion. Therefore if you're doing the exact same thing every time you get to the 18 yard line it becomes ever more easy to defend.

[xceleryx]

56 minutes ago, east lower said:

Which in itself is not logical as those two you refer to are two of the three most successful PL/1st Division (old speak) managers/coaches of all time.

Problem stems from owners who believe they can run football clubs themselves without due experience, hiring in said experience in our case using a model that’s never won a PL title. It’s got team promotion and some improvements, but won nothing in England or a CL. 

They are indeed. However, Man City had several years of groundwork put in planning for the arrival of Pep, part of which included hiring Pellegrini to aid the migration. I can't speak too much about the early years under Fergie because I've no real personal knowledge of them, but from what I understand is that he also spent a lot of money (for the time) and while some improvement was had it wasn't necessarily smooth sailing either. Wasn't until after some sustained success that he power to virtually do as he pleased was evident. Again, correct me if I'm wrong here. 

And there's teams that've gone for the tried and tested conventional methods and won nothing either. Strong settled foundations for me still remain the key.

[xceleryx]

1 hour ago, east lower said:

And any one of them is multiple times better than relying on Broja  - a blind man could see that. And that was before his injury and a year out of playing. 

The same blind man could also see that Nkunku is not and was not a direct replacement as someone who’ll lead your line in the PL.

I have zero faith in the coach, I had little faith in him when appointed but the owners and the faceless football people appointed have not helped him, despite what money they have spent.

That may be true, but if the options weren't really there at the time of need then there isn't much you can do either - to a degree.

People would've turned real quick had we spent on someone in a panic to plug the gap and they not performed either, we've seen it countless times before when we've signed players. In a sense it's a hard situation to truly win, unless the signing made exceeds expectations - something we've not had often in the striker role over the last 20 years. 

[xceleryx]

1 hour ago, ROTG said:

The club hire a scout from the championship and hey ho - an ex championship player is all of a sudden a +50m target on the clubs radar... Coincidence?

Maybe it's also got something to do with the fact Gyokeres had scored 17 and 21 goals respectively in the two prior Championship seasons gone, then moved to Sporting in the summer and currently has 11 in 15, with a further 3 in 5 Europa League games.

He's an inform player in what is a fairly barren market for strikers.

Put the tin foil hat back in the wardrobe.

[Mark Kelly]

One thing I have noticed and I am as far from a tactician as it's possible to be so maybe someone with more knowledge can explain this is that whenever we play the ball out to the winger , they're generally isolated and have very few options , occasionally the full back will pop in to help for a bit and then you have two players passing the ball to each other out wide with nowhere to go I have noticed many times that nobody in midfield and I'm especially targeting Caicedo here comes across and makes an angle for them to pass into the middle third of the pitch and we then end up passing the ball backwards towards our own goal and starting the farce again.

Last night Boro put two players on Madueke and Caicedo never showed for the pass once which would have opened up the middle of the pitch for us and helped us have some more meaningful possession where there was at least the off chance we could exploit the space to our advantage.

For me it's a coaching issue , one of not having any idea what to do , how to support your team mates or to show for the pass. 

When you add to it the constant personnel changes in defence , players being played out of position and poorly too , no help for the wingers , isolated forwards , glory hunters who do everything to make them look good and bugger the team and lack of application , spirit and desire , one has to conclude that Poch is taking the piss. 

[ROTG]

4 minutes ago, xceleryx said:

Maybe it's also got something to do with the fact Gyokeres had scored 17 and 21 goals respectively in the two prior Championship seasons gone, then moved to Sporting in the summer and currently has 11 in 15, with a further 3 in 5 Europa League games.

He's an inform player in what is a fairly barren market for strikers.

Put the tin foil hat back in the wardrobe.

To think he only cost Sporting £7m more than Chelsea spent on D Fofana.

its a funny old game this scouting business. 😀

[Chelsea_Matt]

10 minutes ago, Mark Kelly said:

One thing I have noticed and I am as far from a tactician as it's possible to be so maybe someone with more knowledge can explain this is that whenever we play the ball out to the winger , they're generally isolated and have very few options , occasionally the full back will pop in to help for a bit and then you have two players passing the ball to each other out wide with nowhere to go I have noticed many times that nobody in midfield and I'm especially targeting Caicedo here comes across and makes an angle for them to pass into the middle third of the pitch and we then end up passing the ball backwards towards our own goal and starting the farce again.

Last night Boro put two players on Madueke and Caicedo never showed for the pass once which would have opened up the middle of the pitch for us and helped us have some more meaningful possession where there was at least the off chance we could exploit the space to our advantage.

For me it's a coaching issue , one of not having any idea what to do , how to support your team mates or to show for the pass. 

When you add to it the constant personnel changes in defence , players being played out of position and poorly too , no help for the wingers , isolated forwards , glory hunters who do everything to make them look good and bugger the team and lack of application , spirit and desire , one has to conclude that Poch is taking the piss. 

And so far, both Caicedo and Enzo have been a waste of well north of £200,000,000. Especially Caicedo.

He’s an Ecuadorean Bernard Lambourde.

[thevelourfog]

1 hour ago, east lower said:

Which in itself is not logical as those two you refer to are two of the three most successful PL/1st Division (old speak) managers/coaches of all time.

Problem stems from owners who believe they can run football clubs themselves without due experience, hiring in said experience in our case using a model that’s never won a PL title. It’s got team promotion and some improvements, but won nothing in England or a CL. 
 

Going into micro-analysis of players performances, abilities isn’t steadying this club now, it’s the macro stuff that needs change.

He’s the primary and immediate issue, I don’t disagree at all that the longer-term problem is the ownership, the people they have running the show and their football focussed appointments. But all the latter aren’t going anywhere soon and we have got to hope that they see the error in their ways - that’s not a completely forlorn hope as money, or the lack of it might demonstrate they’ve messed it up royally. 
 

But the very first thing that has to be rectified is that this coach has to go, he not just a symptom of the ownerships errors, he’s the causation of so much more.

I think we see a lot the same, but some key things differently. I agree entirely with what you say about the macro issues being what needs to change. Very sadly, I just see who coaches us a micro issue now.

Not very long ago, any real problems we had were contained to one, or at most, a few individuals, and those problems could be improved on or completely resolved by personnel change. We had the stability and infrastructure to make those changes without losing all continuity and starting over, and the prestige and pull to bring in better replacements.

Now we have dozens of problem individuals, across the coaching, playing, medical, scouting, operational and business facets of the club. We have no one who has been here more than 5 minutes, and we are a club anyone with immediate aspirations will avoid like the plague. I can only see has-beens or broadly unknown punts taking the job, not a steadying hand.

I've never seen a Pochettino team play like this for this long. Either he has completely lost what skills he had (I think unlikely but possible), or Chelsea FC is not a place where anyone can do their best work. Based on what everyone else is serving up, that's what I'm leaning towards.

He'll be off in what counts as soon in the grand scheme, anyway.

[paulw66]

3 hours ago, xceleryx said:

And sign who exactly? 

 

A loan deal for CR7. Tell him to stay in between the width of the posts and smash the ball in the onion bag. 

[paulw66]

1 hour ago, Sleeping Dave said:

Hey ho. The volatility train keeps huffing along. I’ve said this all season, this side is too young and lacks too many instrumental pieces to be a solid top side. 

I don’t think we should sign a striker in January. I don’t think we should sign a replacement CB for Silva either. Continue and play out the season with what we’ve got and come summer add three instrumental pieces to the side;

A goal scoring striker

A goal scoring wide player

A goal scoring central midfield player

We sorely lack goals and have for years. You can’t be a top side without scoring goals, it really is that simple. 

Largely agree with this. I do think having a proper no9 will help the wide players get more goals though. Someone who can hold it up, occupy defenders, create space for others. Giroud? 

Mitrovic. Think he'd be ideal. Bit of nastiness about him.

Edited January 10 by paulw66

[Bert19]

1 hour ago, Mark Kelly said:

Ive been shouting this into the wind all season. 

He's a coward and he's actively working to make our players look worse than they are. 

Any coach out there, get Steve Cooper, any one would set them up better. 

Agree. I said weeks ago that it cannot be possible that another coach couldn't set us up better than Pochettino does.  

No shape, no compacting off the ball, no tactical approach, no principles or characteristics to the side and no attacking patterns or cohesion. 

He seems to have initially gone for a style of play (that has largely disappeared now btw).  When the first job was to get us organised and establish the standards and expectations for every player in every game.  Instead of building from the back and expanding, he's missed the most important aspects of building a side.  

Emery, Howe, Dyche (plus others) are all having success from building from the back and getting their teams organised and structured to compete in this League. Get a few results, players start to buy in and then you expand a bit.  They tend to listen to your further plans when the initial ones have been successful. 

Why haven't we done that? It seems especially important given the youth of the squad. Get the standards and expectations drilled into them now and it might just set them forever. 

Looking back at it now (and knowing what we know about his set up), it's pretty clear that he was a reason that Spurs squad never got over the line despite several opportunities.  One also wonders if he simply lucked in with Kane and where they'd have got to without him. 

It's not all on him (Palmer made a mess last night), but he is a serious problem for us. I genuinely cannot understand what we work on each week and how we seem to just have zero preparation game to game.  If they aren't looking already, surely the owners can't want another season of this?  

[asvaberg]

51 minutes ago, Chelsea_Matt said:

And so far, both Caicedo and Enzo have been a waste of well north of £200,000,000. Especially Caicedo.

He’s an Ecuadorean Bernard Lambourde.

That's harsh on Lambourde

[martin1905]

1 hour ago, patThenevin said:

The amount of tosh that has been signed, both in ability and mentality.....yet again Winstanely and Lawro get a pass from the vast majority here.

Imagine spending the obscene amd club future challenging levels we have and not have a good goalie nor forward.

Abject but yeah let's go down the manager scapegoat route. 

The financier stains and their appointments of those two Muppets are where our ire at what is happening at the club should be directed.

No manager in the world will sort out the misaligned and ludicrously expensive flops we have, a club cleansed of any identity and with a massive financial weight around it's neck.......or people putting that on poch too? 

You are right but I've been watching football long enough from my boys being involved in grass routes football for the past 11 years to watching us win 2 European cups so literally every level from the very bottom all the way to the absolute pinnacle of the sport and I have very rarely, if ever, seen such a poorly coached team. The only one that compares is us under Potter.

I got a lot of abuse for calling it early but the signs were there from the very beginning and we now have a big enough sample that shows just how inept the manager and his coaching team are and we have seen absolutely nothing to show they can turn this around.

We can rip the club to pieces, the owners, the scouting team, the money spent, the culling of the old guard, the purchase of far too many young players, the sacking of Tuchel, the appointments of three awful managers. There has been a long, long list of terrible decisions since the club was sold. None of that matters though when you break it down to the very basics of setting a team team up to play, compete and hopefully win football matches. 

Yes we would be better with a striker. Yes we would be better with some more experience. Yes we would be better without so many injury prone players but all that aside its not too much to ask to expect the manager to coach a squad on a daily basis and them get them ready to compete on the football pitch.

It's really not all that difficult. A manager, any half competent one, should have a philosophy. A style. A way of playing football that he drills into them on the training ground and it doesn't matter who is playing. It doesn't matter if players are injured. It doesn't matter if you are Man City or a team of 7 year olds playing grass routes football on a Sunday morning.

They train and train and train and take what they are taught during training into games. It doesn't matter if you are a high pressing, high intensity, possession based team playing on the front foot or a team that plays a low block,  with everyone behind the ball and looks to counter. The important thing is having a manager that understands the game and how he wants it to be played. A manager that is able to coach a team in a system that regardless of who is playing they play the same. Best example of that is Tottenham right now. Doesn't matter who plays, they all know their roles and how to play them and play the same, even with all their key players missing.

As I have said, I've been involed with my boys grass routes football now for 11 years, from 4 years old up until under 16's and have seen far better organised, far better coached teams at that level than what we are currently seeing. Since I gave my season ticket up I've been following Aldershot, as they are my local team, home and away and again have seen teams set up, far better than us, more organised than us, more disciplined than us, more motivated than us,  playing non league football.

It's embarrassing and no matter that we have too many young players, too many injuries, no striker and whatever other excuses people have made all season. Break the game down to its most simple form and nobody will be able to convince me anything other than the manager is inept.

I've said all season that it has never been about results but about performances. If we were 10th in the league but seeing something, anything to suggest we are building something I'd have no problem. All we have seen, all season is a manager with no philosophy who has never achieved anything in the game and has no idea how to implement a system, a style, an identity to a team. He can't organise them. He can't motivate them. He can't do his job.

He lives on his reputation for what he did at Tottenham but when you look at  what he actually achieved there, nothing, and look at the players he had during his time there he was put on a pedestal for failing. He was there with a team that was more than good enough to win trophies. Before Pep and Kloop made their machines, when Leicester won the league, when Conte won the league in his first season after we finished 10th the season before, during a time when there was no stand out team and he completely and utterly failed. Just imagine Pep had gone there and not City, with that squad he'd have walked the league, more than once.

Apparently he improves players? That was his main selling point when we hired him but has he ever actually done that? I can't think of one player he's improved here, but plenty that aren't as good. Much like how players performed under Tuchel and then Potter. Does he or did he just have a group of players at Tottenham, all together at the right time, that were always going to be good? Is Harry Kane the best striker in the world because of Pochettino or in spite of him? Did Vertonghen and Alderweireld become one of the best centre back pairings in the league because of him? Is Son the played he is today because of him? Or was it just the perfect group of players that made him look good but when they really needed him, he failed?

He relies, solely,  on individual brilliance from his players which is what made his Tottenham team. Kane, Son, Eriksen,  Delle,  Dembele,  Walker,  Vertonghen, Alderweireld all playing at their very best at a low point, in terms of quality teams, across the rest of the league. When it really mattered. When the team needed their manager to step up. To have a plan B. To motivate them. To manage a game of football and not just rely on the 11 players you pick to play well. To do something different in a final when the opposition scores inside 2 minutes and then change their gameplan from trying to win to not loosing. To have a system in place, after years, so when individuals aren't at their best someone steps in and does the same job. To push them on to actually achieve something. He couldn't.  He failed.  He's always failed and unsurprisingly he's failing again but this time he hasn't got the individual brilliance of players to make him look good so he is being shown up for exactly what he is.

We have seen first hand over the past, nearly 5 years now, since Frank's first time what difference a proper manager makes. We are literally the best placed fan base in the world to know how important the manager is. How much of a difference someone like Tuchel can make compared to Frank before him  or Potter after him, with same group of players!!!!  We've seen it with our own eyes for quite a while now, it's what amazes me when people don't see it. 

 

Edited January 10 by martin1905

[Bert19]

24 minutes ago, martin1905 said:

You are right but I've been watching football long enough....

(snipped)

Thanks You @martin1905 - you've summed up my own feelings far better than I could have 😄

And I agree with everything you've written here.  Well said Sir

[Mark Kelly]

A reminder for those that think blaming Poch for the shortcomings of the side is unfair .

This is a man who came second in France with a forward line of   Neymar, Mbappe and Messi.

It doesn't matter who we sign , Pochettino will find a way to make them worse at football.