Yea it makes me nervous too but we could jump to second place and the race would be on like never before. We need to be ready for that game.
No doubt. Michy has talent but he's just not a good fit for a team that is looking for the center forward to hold up the ball. Giroud was a good get and will rotate well with Morata.
It looks like other teams have sussed that if you press us high it can cause us problems, I don't think I've ever seen a team press so deeply in the opposition half as West Brom did at times, Courtois was still trying to pass out from his goal, there was one point when his pass practically rolled along the dead ball line to Rudiger and he was still challenged before the ball had even a chance to leave the box.
How many points for a win, again? Above Arsenal. Above Spurs. Good performance against a poor team. Giroud rusty but you can see the quality. Same with Morata. Obvious how badly we need to replace/upgrade Willian/Pedro.
hopefully with Giroud and Morata back we can get the release balls to stick a little bit. having players able to hold the ball up there will dramatically reduce the willingness of teams to press high.
I mean that's possible but I'd wager it's unlikely. Conte has been clear he wants more established talent in. He hasn't been happy with our boards spending and I'd guess by the fact that he said he'd have liked Sanchez but because of money we couldn't be serious players means he wants a winger too. But who knows we likely won't know for sure till his biography comes out after he retires. I can easily see that being a tell all.
Every manager says they want the best players. Very few are able to grab them. And I think very few care about age of these players as fans do. Managers are at a club for 2 years max and they are looking for maximum impact right now.
Yep.. And considering some decisions made by Conte and Mourinho before him (Salah, KDB, Lukaku, Felipe Luis, Chalobah, Ake, etc.), I understand the board would be reluctant to just throw money at whoever simply because a manager wills it.
This belongs in the manager thread, but whatever. I think Conte won the league in the wrong year. If we had the year we're having now last year and won the league this year, Conte would be extended by now. He has a better record than Jose with a title to boot in the past two seasons - playing with far fewer resources. One is extended, the other will be gone in May.
"Far fewer" is debatable. Jose ran the same 11 into the ground that season and didn't have the legend we know as N'Golo Kante. Conte also has his own set of issues. Highly emotional guy who had a very public falling out with a popular player in the dressing room and is making sure everyone and their mother knows that if he gets fired, it isn't his fault. There are no real victims in either of these stories. I feel the board went all in on Jose and that was a horrible error.
Im talking about Jose's tenure at United vs. Conte's at Chelsea. One has been successful, Jose has not. And every manager does all he can to publicize that the current situation is not their fault. It's not a trait inherent to Conte. I'm saying, Conte has had a great two years at Chelsea given the restraints.
Ah, confused Jose's United tenure w/ his time at Chelsea. He has been talking a lot and way too much for anyone's liking. The board broke a club record fee to replace the player he fell out with. The board bent over backwards to replace a capable striker with a 31 year old because he wanted it. I find his almost weekly bitching to be tiresome but that's just me. We've seen the market go absolutely insane the last couple of years and the reality despite us not spending anywhere near as much as our competitors, we have more silverware to show for it. The board is largely to thank for this. Outside of the horror season, our team has never been too far from competing for silverware no matter who the manager was. Given his resources, yes, last season was a huge accomplishment and this season hasn't been a bad one. Flaws in our team as well as his own tactical decisions have been exposed. Let's hope both Conte and the board can keep their cool, put things in perspective and build. Unfortunately, Conte seems content with playing victim and I see him being impossible to make agreement with unless you give him 100% of the things he wants or thinks he needs.
Gunna have to play Devils Advocate here, too. Costa wouldn't shut up about going back to Madrid almost as soon as he got here. Amongst other assholey things on and off the pitch. Plus huge swaths of poor form and injury. We also sold Costa at age 28 for around 48.5m pounds, offsetting a good portion of the Morata purchase, as is our M.O. Our third largest sale ever. The 58m we spent on Morata in 2017 is roughly 49.15m adjusted for inflation to 2011, when we bought Torres. Morata has arrived a better player for now and the future. And he's not a total dick, though he did dye his hair red because he thought he was going to United. A better argument is that the club has given Conte 5 out of their top 10 ever highest purchases. That's astounding, whether our policy is one player in, one player out or not. Morata: 58m Bakayoko: 40m Drinkwater: 35m Batshuyai: 32m Kante: 32m Neymar hyper inflated the market, but still, that's a lot of expensive players we bought for Conte.
Given that we've sold players to buy most of these players and the huge inflation in the market, this is incredibly misleading. During this time we've also sold Oscar, Matic, Costa and Ramires, for record fees. That is a horrible, horrible argument.
Conte made the Chalobah and Ake decisions? News to me. Beyond which, it's not at all clear those decisions were wrong. Christensen and Rudiger have been very good, while neither Ake nor Chalobah have set the world alight at their new destination. I'm less happy about Conte's decision to send RLC on loan, but he has given the youth some playing time. Also, any discussion of Conte should be clear that other than Morata and potentially Bakayoko, he hasn't gotten his first choice players (Nainngolan, Koulibaly, Sandro, etc. etc.) You can't possibly argue it was Conte that wanted Drinkwater or Batsuyahi. I'm not suggesting that Conte should be given carte blanche to buy whoever he wants, but we have been net even on spending the last two seasons. Given that, his performance is great, and he has been a great manager everywhere he has gone. Unless we're willing to give a new manager a huge transfer kitty, why get rid of Conte? On top of that, some players who're great in Conte's system are unlikely to carry their form over to a new one; most notably Alonso.
Conte created a big problem for himself with the success he had in turning Victor Moses of all players into a competent right wing back. He then compounded that by overachieving and winning the league. Any request for funds thereafter probably devolved quickly into "why do you need to spend all that money, look what you did with Victor Moses FFS".
In the philosophical sense that no club has to buy any player? Sure. In the real world sense, no - clubs need to buy players, otherwise they're Hull last season who failed to buy any players after being promoted, which one analyst aptly compared to a local chap jumping into a tiger cage with a pint of lager. Making the argument on nominal rather than inflation adjusted terms is fundamentally stupid. And we spent how much on other players like Drinkwater and Bakayoko instead? Three cheers for parsimony! Besides, no one is suggesting we should have bought them all. But would we be better with Nainngolan over either Drinkwater or Bakayoko? I'm not sure how we would be worse.