That was a disgrace, the job is obviously beyond Sarri, yes I know we have to give coaches time but if you compare Sarri to say Emery you will see a BIG difference - under Emery Arsenal are making small steps, with Sarri we are going backwards.....and at quite a rate of knots, Eddie Howe would of course be fantastic BUT he is English and as we all know the English 'cant coach' so instead of Howe a man that has coached a TINY local football club to the top of the English game, a man that gets 'average' players competing with multi-million pound superstars and often beating them (sometimes 4-0!!) a man that knows English football inside out we have Sarri a 'sophisticated Italian' coach who has basically been found out and HAS NO PLAN B!
I was going to say that too. Pep want to shake hand with Sarri, Sarri obviously saw it but decided to ignore Pep, and just walk into the tunnel. Obviously Sarri doesn't want to shake hand with Pep. I would shake hand though, so what if Pep win, it just being civil you know. And something is seriously wrong with Chelsea defense if they conceeded this much goals in one game. Perhaps Mourinho defense style would help, I would get Mourinho back temporaly to fix this defense, then sack him again afterwards, lol. j/k. I heard Mourinho going back to Inter Milan.
Sarri without cigarettes is like Samson without his hair. What a trouncing. Glad i was at 40000 feet and utterly unable to risk watching it. At least we did football a service today and pad out the city GD in the title race.
I'm kinda not minding that Sarri obviously doesn't rate AC as highly as most people ... it means that he's not tarred by the poor performance
Sacking Sarri after not even a season is crazy harsh and won’t endear us to other coaches or players...but my god, man, make an adjustment. I think the caution about Eddie Howe is warranted. The kind of coach that can make mid-level players excel at a small club isn’t always successful with high talent, high ego, high leverage super stars and top programs. I remember when Michigan (the other kind of football) hired Rich Rodriguez after his success at West Virginia. Same refrain: “Just think about what he could do with Michigan’s resources!” Unfortunately, the competition and culture at the bigger school ate him alive. That said, I love Howe and would be happy to see him get a shot...especially since post-Hazzard Chelsea will be facing a long rebuilding process. He already knows how to win at The Bridge.
Worth thinking about considering Jose criticized the squad. If Conte had stayed at Chelsea, he wanted to get rid of around half the squad. It sounded like madness at the time, but it seems he was right. The job he did in winning the PL title and FA Cup looks better by the week.— Matt Law (@Matt_Law_DT) February 10, 2019
The reference to Rodriguez has another parallel...does your system work against low and mid-level teams but fail against elite talent and elite coaching? Systems that take advantage of teams that lack elite speed or coaching staffs that lack the ability to counter-strategize can quickly go asunder. A coach must constantly adapt while maintaining a core set of values. Players get hurt, challengers arrive with new tactics and the ball bounces unpredictably at times. A manager that says they want to play like they did elsewhere or play “my football” needs to assess what they have on the training pitch, what their opponents are doing to attack/defend and come up with a better plan than playing “my football” and losing 6-0. Or they can play “their football” elsewhere.
I don't know about obviously. They are both friends apparently. I think he was just shell shocked. It is not his style not to shake hands like Jose or maybe Conte would. The BBC reported it like this: By the final whistle, Sarri looked so disorientated that he flew past his friend and admirer Pep Guardiola's outstretched hand without even realising it was there.
That was painful to watch. Nottingham Forrest beat us say 7-0 in 1991. That was bad, but Sunday was worse. We are now 6th and "Sarri ball" seems to be going the way of AVB's "Project". We were a comfortable top 4 team in December. I think top 4 at the end of the season was our realistic goal this year. Man Utd switched managers and it turned their season round. Chelsea historically have had no problems letting managers go after only a short time - see AVB and Scolari. We are in a Cup Final at the end of the month - but how realistic is winning that against City? Although we have beaten City 2-0 this season. Sarri ball - this exciting and attacking style of play was what Roman always wanted. I think he was trying to get "Pep ball" on the cheap. "Sarri-ball" - high-paced, passing, attacking football based on pressing and short, quick exchanges - it is how City play and it is what the fans want. But it is not possible with a lot of our current players. We are now a club in crisis where even the manager admits he is unable to motivate his players. The dressing room is turning on him? Our dressing room seems to turn on everybody. I have sympathy for Sarri in that he has inherited a bunch of players who can be real brats. However, the manager is responsible for motivating the players and he is also responsible for sticking with a style that no longer seems to be working. This Chelsea team do not tackle. The only decent tackling player is Kante - who is the best defensive midfield player in the world and he is currently playing on the right flank. That is increasingly a problem. Jorghino looked fragile against City. He never tackles properly and subsequently the defence is totally exposed. Sarri won't change that. We didn't have a striker and now we do and Higuain has looked much better than Morratta or Giroud, if only we had him at the beginning of the season. He has come in at the wrong time. Poor bloke. Some of the blame is with the manager, he needs to be able to change tactics during games and before games. He is still learning the ropes, but time is a luxury not allowed in this league. Beat City in the final and he might rescue his season. Although top 4 is the real prize. We will only be able to get the necessary players to improve in the long term with a top 4 finish. The players are a quiet and unmotivated bunch. We need to overhaul our squad - keep all the youth and get rid of the deadwood. We can argue about who has to go, but I think it is more about knowing their personalities than anything else. Pedro played under Pep many years ago at Barca - he was mainly a sub. Pep wouldn't be interested in having Pedro in his current City squad. Time has moved on and Chels are stuck in the past. No club in the top 6 would be interested in having Pedro in their squad. Let alone in the first XI. The club. Is the club the real problem? Director of Football? Extremely Weak in the transfer market. Roman no longer swooping in and spending lots of money. Roman wanted the club to be more self-sufficient - all those players on loan and making tidy sums on selling off our players who never really played for us. A decent business model when you look at it. However, Roman is not making the big signings at the top of the food chain. There is his visa issue and the fact that no longer seems to love the UK. He shelved the plans to re-develop the ground. There have been rumours in the financial world that he has been trying to sell the club for a number of years now. Apparently, he will not sell to anybody, he is looking for the 'right' buyer. He is unlikely to sell to rich arabs apparently and the word is he is looking for rich American ownership. They say that that is the reason that the club bought the top USA product in Pulisic. Time will tell if this is true or not. In the meantime we are a club in crisis. . .
i turned things off at 3-0 and have basically tried to ignore everything. i'm glad to see players get some stick. Sarri deserves some, sure. but it was the players that allowed 6 in, and it's the players that have basically forced the sacking of three managers in a row now. i didn't watch the whole game, you can't analyze a game like that, but chelsea started well enough, but that first goal, my god, alonso....wtf....you can't put that on Sarri and that basically led to a complete panic, and again, that's got to be players. the paper mache is finally falling apart from the last 5 years of patching.
The Chelsea managerial post is a poisoned chalice. How many competent managers have imploded here now? I firmly believe that had Guardiola or Klopp arrived here, they would have been sacked within a season or two too. Klopp in particular would have been sacked twice in the last 4 years if he were at Chelsea (7th in the table with Dortmund in 14/15, 8th with Liverpool in 15/16). The Chelsea manager has to fight not only the media (who are constantly stirring up sh!t) but internal forces as well (the board and playing staff). Managers here are not given the chance to build their own squad, but are expected to work only with what the board has given them and produce immediate results. When things go wrong for a couple of games, fans bay for the manager's head (but never the people on the board), the media ramps up pressure, and the board concludes that the manager has lost it again. It's an impossible job to stay clear headed in. Sarri (and any manager for that matter) needs time, the freedom to build his squad, and above all, patience and confidence from the board and fans. And if we can't give the manager the freedom to build his squad, we need a director of football because Marina is doing such a sh!t job at it.
Voiced my opinion perfectly. There is only so much a manager can do when the players are either not talented or don't care.
For me, it was all over after the first goal within 4 minutes. Hazard/Alonso f'd up on that free kick and it was all over from there. That's on the players being lazy. I'm not sure how that's Sarri's fault. Yes, letting 6 in is horrible and part of that is motivation from the manager. But players not doing the simplest of tasks, like marking a player making a run? Awful.
Upcoming fixtures: Thursday night’s Europa League trip to Malmo. Then Manchester United in the FA Cup, Malmo in the second leg, City in the final of the Carabao Cup and then Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League on February 27. IF we win all these games Sarri will be fine. UEFA Europa League will gain automatic entry into the UEFA Champions League so Sarri may want to win that trophy more than anything.
I’d be more apt to pile on the players if Sarri had made a single adjustment all year. If the comment is always, my system works but the players don’t get it...IDK, that just doesn’t wash. EVERYONE has figured him out. You either man-mark Jorghino or pack it in and counter. We don’t have the defense to stop anyone. Doesn’t matter now, but I wish we’d been more patient with Conte.
This is where I’m at. Sarri gets no sympathy frome me. The master ********ing Sarri ball maestro, Jorginho, is an unmitigated disaster. If you’re failing by fine margins here and there, OK let’s look at the squad. If your team gets it’s ass handed to it like we did, it’s on management. Especially when it’s right after Bournemouth tearing us a new one. Conte was never a long term answer. His drama with players and the board proved that. I don’t blame the club for having to part ways with him and Jose. Shit happens, it’s the reality of how the league works. If you can’t adjust, if you’re going to cause a big stink with the club, you aren’t going to last. The only manager I miss is Carlo Ancellotti.
i have to disagree, there has been kind of a media storm coming out with reports that some of the players gave up on Sarri over a month ago already. if that's true that the third successive manager that you can pretty clearly call a pattern of players pushing out managers they disagree with. and even if that's NOT the case, that's still three years of what we can pretty clearly see as players choosing when they want to give 100% and when they don't. this isn't a one-off. combine this with really clear messaging we've got from each of the managers about the squad needing to be rejuvenated and freshened up. jose said it in his final post game interview that some of the players had given up, conte mentioned MANY times how the squad needed new players. and combine that with the reports in 2015 that when pep was approached for the job he turned it down because he said the squad needed 10 new players and him and the club weren't able to reconcile that. now hindsight is everything here but there are too many clear patterns at play. this squad needs an overhaul. and some of the big players are hiding in big games when the chips are down. the club never solved the third attacker problem, and should have years ago. in all three of these cases you can put some blame on the managers of course, and it's easier to change managers than squads. but blaming Sarri just hides bigger problems. you can't blame Sarri for some of the absolute school boy on field decisions that have led to laughable goals. not marking Silva, not clearing lines, horrible back headers, these aren't tactics, these are lapses in commitment and concentration. chelsea comprehensively stifled and beat city a couple of months ago with the same manager and same players. do we think Sarri suddenly said "play like crap and not as a team"? sure maybe pep adjusted etc, and it's hard to beat a top team twice in a season, but heads going down and making terrible mistakes when you are down.....what's Sarri supposed to do about that?
Lots of good comments here. One thing I will say regarding the players was that back in the first couple months of the season they were all praising the manager and style of play. Now not getting the results and they suddenly don't like it? Was there ever a question asked or reason given as to why Willian and Kovacic didn't start this game ? Sarri has clearly favored them all season, but then in a big game with week of rest they are not there. Alonso still the same player, just not playing in a 352 where he was successful.
Conte also said that he never wanted to play so defensive but had to because of the squad. If not, you lose 6-0 I guess.