I wouldn't do a victory lap if CP starts against Grimsby-Town in the league cup in 3 days....I mean, if Lampard don't play him against division-3 Grimsby-Town in the cup game, he might as well tell CP to go back to America. Hopefully he can score or play extremely well in 3 days in the league cup..That's the least CP can do for now...Hopefully he could get some minutes during the PremiereLeague weekend match.
Managers do not make decisions based solely on one factor, no matter what it is. You are ignoring all other context relevant to these lineups.
Couldn't agree more. He's 21 as of like last week, right? This is the kind of challenge that a competitor relishes, he's got a long way to go here. He'll start mid-week and I wouldn't be surprised to see him impress. None of that means Frank is a great manager or anything... but just as you said, Chelsea are in a very weird/tough place for a lot of reasons and both their injuries and fixture list have done them very little favors so far.
Your original comment mentioned “not even a sub appearance”. It caused me to lose your overall point which is much better stated above. I’m not arguing your point that Lampard doesn’t seem to have confidence in him. The lack of minutes seem to support that assertion. Personally, I don’t get why so many are freaking out. I’ve seen enough of CP to know that he is capable of holding his own. Whether he does it or not is up to him.
What is frustrating about this thread is the dominance of hot takes at one extreme or the other. He’s been somewhat disappointing. Much of his competition has been worse. Managers who are unsure of themselves, either because of a run of bad results, or being in over their heads, almost always are biased in favor of the safe choice. Like in baseball here...if you sign a replacement level veteran and he plays badly, the fans and the media blame the player. If you give the job to a AAA hotshot and he stinks, you get the blame. If you play a Brazilian or an English kid and he stinks, the player gets the blame. If you play an American or Australian or some other unflavored type of player and he stinks, the manager gets the blame. That’s pretty obviously going on here, to Pulisic’s detriment. So long as Chelsea is struggling and Lampard under daily pressure, Pulisic can’t be marginally better (which is what he has been, in my view.). There has to be clear daylight between him and the competition, which hasn’t been the case. Personally, I think Chelsea is going to continue to struggle mightily because I think there’s a huge mismatch between their talent level + Lampard’s ability on the one hand, and fan expectations on the other. My hope is that when CP gets his chance he’ll be so clearly better than Willian and the rest of his competition that Lampard will have no choice but to keep him in the rotation. My fear is that the downward spiral will continue and Lampard will start to jerk people in and out of the lineup without any rhyme or reason and crush the confidence of the players. EDIT: It seems like all the posts after the page turn made mine redundant.
Kante makes/made a huge difference, and to Chelsea's credit, they did not give up a 2nd half goal, which has been a big problem. Maybe Kante will come up big every game - Chelsea need him to - but ManU is the only "power-team" they've faced away this year and of ManU's 8 GF, 4 were v. Chelski (without Kante on the field for the first 3, but Chelski/Kante did give up 1 in the 15 mins or so he played). Arsenal, B'mouth, Spurs, Citeh and L'pool have more GF than ManU (and Chelsea) this season. Of those Chelsea has only played L'pool at home. Chelsea need Kante for sure, but whether he can be enough to shore up the D agains the top 4-5 remains to be seen. But without him they're toast.
while I cringe of the thought of that (Abramovich bailing out) the logic of that rumor would make a lot more sense about why they paid so much and Lampard does not rate him or play him.
I'm personally not freaking out, but I don't think you shouldn't be concern at all that Lampard couldn't find any minutes for CP despite having 3 matches in 10 days...and 1 of the guy got hurt 4 days ago and was still preferred ahead of CP. I don't understand why people think it is idiotic to be concerned a bit that a $73M player couldn't get 1 minutes in 3 straight matches under 10 days. Maybe if Moahmad Salah had showed more concern when he had early warning signs by Chelsea that his performance wasn't good enough, maybe Salah would had done things differently to save his Chelsea career. What I'm saying is these early concerns could help CP understand he need to improve or the coach won't play him much.
That’s a strange take to me. To me, Salah is evidence that Chelsea is an inefficient organization that compensates via $$$$.
I'm using Salah to prove people that u can't ignore the fact that Lampard hasn't played Pulisic in 3 straight matches in 10 days. Some on here believe showing concern about Pulisic 3 straight DNP as idiotic...But Chelsea has proven that they won't hesitate to get rid of you or not play you at all if you're not performing under their standard. CP has to be alert and hopefully, he can improve as soon as possible.
I'm guessing the fat Spanish waiter awaits his summons. Benitez. I loved his Liverpool teams but feel everything afterwards over emphasized a simplistic negative game plan. I'm certain that Chelsea's goal difference stats would improve, though.
Those situations aren’t equivalent, Salah was bought to keep him from other teams and under a Mourinho regime. They won multiple titles without using Salah and after selling him. CP was bought to be given a chance to be part of the future in the wake of an obvious rebuild and at ~3x the price of Salah. But either way the point isn’t that you can’t be concerned! You can be concerned even if I am not, we can talk about it! The point is, the reasons that have been given for concern in here are almost all nonsense — please show me a single one not reliant on false premises, myopia, or hyperbole? The demonstrated understanding in here of how and why managers do things, what a consistent performance looks like, and even what this Chelsea season is even about... they’re all wayoff. To be concerned and based in reality, you can’t be ticking all those boxes with your arguments. By you I of course mean the royal you.
I have no idea what Chelsea's decision-maker's appetite is for team performance. If Chelsea's leaking goals were solely due to them being overly aggressive and there is a belief that as Kante and the back line get better integrated into the season they will give up less and score more, then maybe there is sense to continuing to go down the current road. It's early to reach sweeping conclusion of this, or any, team in September. That said, Chelsea's D have looked consistently vulnerable, and not just because they are overly-attack minded. They just seem not-that-good at times. And if they don't fix that - whether by being better doing what they are doing, getting different bodies to do what they are doing better or by doing something different, it will not be a very successful season, by even the "transfer ban, we're young" metric. I doubt that calls are going out to Rafa soon, but the D will have to tighten up some way or another.
At the very least, we can all agree Lampard "at the moment" trust Mount, Williams and even Pedro much more than CP....That's my point....I'm not debating on whether he deserve or should be ahead of Mount/Pedro/Williams in the pecking order. In fact, I was among the few who warned people CP current play was not enough to hold-down a starting spot, after he started 3 straight matches. At the very least, I expected a bit of rotation during these 3 matches in 10 days..Under the worst case scenarios, I never thought he would go 3 straight games and zero minutes played...He returned early from international play to get some minutes, so I'm sure CP is disappointed. The point about Salah I was making is Chelsea doesn't wait on players for too long....As soon as the transfer-ban is removed next summer, they will buy another winger..So CP shouldn't rest easy.
The old “reasonable people canNOT disagree” gambit ... It is comforting to believe your own opinion is the only reasonable one. So you have that going for you.
You said it, not me. And that's not what I meant nor implied. I was only responding to your question at the time. I gotta add, the 'slugger' thing made me chuckle (think someone else wrote that). I really do hate when people call me chief. lol And another thing, I only watched the second half of the Chelsea game today. I thought Chelsea didn't look too bad considering the injuries during the game (and resulting forced early subs) and also considering just how good Liverpool can be. While I was happy to see Chelsea sans Pulisic lose, they really had quite a few good chances. It's not like the Mount's and Willians were crap from what I saw. Of course, Kante is a beast and held Chelsea together (not just the goal, although that was a sweet goal). Pulisic has got his work cut out for him to break into Lampard's plans, that's obvious to me at least. And I'll Homer for him here until the cows come home!
I did look up the stats on turnovers (before this weekend's games). However, I did not do a complete look. But, no matter how you slice it, Pulisic was up there as far as leading in "dispossessed" in the Premier League. He ranked 7th overall just on absolute turnovers. I tried to look at it then with "per minute" and "per touch" and he looked even worse (even higher than 7th). But, I didn't get a complete look because it was taking forever to match up all these stats. But... it sure was looking like he was top 5 on both "dispossessed per 90" or "dispossessed per touch." Maybe this is a factor in why Lampard doesn't trust him because Chelsea's defense has absolutely been underperforming in the goals allowed category. So, he doesn't want a player (even with the possible rewards) out there losing the ball so much.
The bench with his butt? I suppose he could play but I wouldn't go out on a limb at this point and say it's even likely.
I believe so..He needs to do better at keeping the ball.. If he's gonna be top 10 in the league at dispossession/turnovers, he'll have to produce more goal/assist to balance out all these turnovers.
Of course CP will play on Wednesday...Chelsea is playing a league-one team...He should not only play, but he should start.