Was thinking the same last night. I don't like losing, but this is a friendly. Hopefully it scares the squad straight.
I agree the lack of signings are a problem, I've said this. However, playing RLC in a game like this isn't the answer.
Not suggesting he's the answer but there's a very good chance he ends up playing a lot of games due to our lack of depth. This is overly-reminiscent of the season after we won the double where a fresh-from-Portugual Ramires ended up playing as a holding mid for like a month because we sold half our backups and replaced them with nobody. And what, a couple days beforehand Hazard looked like.. Hazard? Haha. Wouldn't look too much into that.
I do think that we really missed a big opportunity to propel ourselves with the Bayerns and Barcas of the world this season. We have a great squad, great manager and big money coming in from new sponsors and TV deals. Yet, we have failed to capitalize on that and stood still (and in some ways gone backwards but think our defense will be addressed). Oh well, we will be up there fighting for the league but will be a lot tougher given Costa's constant hamstring problems. I don't think we can go deep in the CL.
Ramires looked good yesterday when not in the pivot. He just can't finish for shite. Outside the chip, he's been miss more than hit. I'm not opposed to having Ram as depth, but in our current formation he's pretty useless unless played on the right and he's mostly useless there. The scary part is that two of the 4 main title contenders have significantly better midfields now and are better than ours. That part is concerning. Even someone like MVG would have been an upgrade.
Or the occasional start (or 5 minutes) in preseason matches against PSG and Barcelona. A rather meaningless match against Arsenal at Wembley is not what I'd necessarily consider a baptism by fire. I'm not saying that youth is the answer to all our problems, but the theory that there's pressure to add youth to the first team made sense to me before we gave them minutes in 1/4 of our preseason matches so far. It seems we are not looking to add fresh faces to the squad whether they are big money signings or products of the academy
The CL part is tough. We made it to the semi's with a much weaker squad and won the damn thing with a squad that was as bad as any I've seen in 15 years of watching Chelsea. We need some luck in the draw, but we also need more depth.
Remy played, didn't he? I know my statin-addled brain's not up to much these days but I'm sure I saw that bugger out there at some point. Maybe not
True but there is a huge difference between that miracle run (yes it was a miracle) versus going into the season and seeing your squad as LIKELY to make it to the latter stages. Right now I'm just not seeing it. Everyone else's team made significant improvements. It's borderline arrogant to think we are going to mount a serious title/CL challenge imo. Either that or everyone who starts either never gets hurt or doesn't lose all their steam halfway thru again.
We should have no problem with getting to the knockouts and I'd argue we should have no issues getting to the quarters. We lost a match yesterday in which we significantly out played the other side. Our finishing was very poor and defensively we had some lapses. We were out Chelsea'd. I wouldn't go as far to say that we won't do anything yet, but we still lack depth in midfield and it's concerning. All that said though, I'm far from writing off the season. We will play deep into most competitions as we almost always do.
FFS Wrath my man... don't DO that to an old fart like me. I have enough of a job keeping track of what day it is anyway