“I’ve not been let down by my defenders – we’ve made mistakes in the buildup to the goals, not just defenders, which cost us the game.” That quote is a bad sign
Somehow that was my first time seeing Lofton-Cheeks. Very unusual style. Kind of elegant but also his passes lacked zip. Maybe he’s not up to speed from lots of injuries. Looks fairly creative but likely needs to be paired with a bulldog.
this could be an all-time lopsided team next season (best offense vs most thoroughly inept defense). theyre not even attempting to address it. like, they clearly dont rate bats (which personally i dont get), but they wont even take ake back (whatever situation that is). rudiger is the only consistently average defender they have. the first thing they should do, though, is sell kante. hes too good for the team- he cant shield all four defenders at once, and hes better than all but puli/willian/kovasic attacking/in possession so hes wasted doing the job of the barkleys/rlcs. and kepa saving less than half the shots on goal for a season is a SHOCKING stat. am i going overboard saying there are field players who could do that?
Case in point: you pegged Barkley's performance perfectly and you didn't see the match lol. Barkley is capable of moments for sure, but they're too far between and too offset by consistently trying to power the ball through multiple defenders. Shooters gotta shoot, but outside of de Bruyne types, shooters also gotta accept physics exist.
Yeah, I'm worried this is shaping up to be a Dortmund-esque experience for Pulisic. He'll certainly have the better attacking talent once Werner and Ziyech can take the pitch, but the backline is shaping up to be as similarly inept as Pulisic's final season with BVB. Whatever happened to Reece James? Wasn't he supposed to be the future at outside back? I know Azpi can dime it and Alonso can boost an attack, but it seems weird Chelsea seem to have gone so far away from James since the break.
James is a mystery. He showed flashes of very strong play before the stoppage. I have been shocked at how he looks since the return. I thought he was part of the future at OB. It is discouraging that Frank thinks they don’t need help at CB. Maybe they plan to put Rice there if they get him. Alonso and Mount and CP could have been holding hands on the attack for the last 20 min. Spacing on the left was so poor. Next year they will have three explosive players who are best in space. Yesterday was slow and crowded, not only because of what WHU was doing. I think Moyes outcoached Frank yesterday. However Frank rates CP, I think the chances of him languishing on the bench are much lower now. He is showing what he has. His market value is going up. He will be playing a lot at Chelsea, or playing a lot somewhere else. Quick, creative, technical players who don’t like a lot of contact always are met with ambivalence in some circles of UK football. The best ones show their value and find a place to play where that value is put to best use. I am excited about the potential of the Chelsea attack for next year. Frank needs to find a great and flexible tactical mind to help him figure out how to use it. JMO.
I watched a 13 minute YouTube highlight clip of the match. Just going by the match highlights, Puli looked fantastic. It won't stick, but with that acceleration he should be nicknamed Tesla. To me, again, this is just off of watching a 13 minute YouTube highlight thing, that was the first time watching him that I thought he legit could reach world class status. Also, seems like he's getting more respect from the ref. Not sure he gets those calls last fall.
I think Frank rates Pulisic pretty highly. He keeps playing like this, he's clearly undroppable. He was about 95% of Chelsea's offense in the run of play yesterday. He just needs to keep working on finishing and he'd be absurd.
The article focus's on the hype. It cites some examples of Chelsea fanboys comparing Puli favorably to Hazard. We know that can change with one bad match. I personally am not doing that. I'm just saying that I said that this past match was the 1st time Puli looked potentially world class to me, and apparently there are others who share that view: https://www.express.co.uk/sport/foo...Eden-Hazard-West-Ham-draw-Premier-League-news
I watched the game. He was very dangerous and his teammates know it, they look to get him the ball. He also clearly have the greenlight to go at defenders. If he had curled in that early chance, it would have been a real 5 star performance.
He definitely looks like the injuried have taken a toll. Whether that's permanent is something we will have to see.
The way Pulisic is playing lately, and when you consider he's still only 21, he is well on his way to being world class by pretty much any definition. I'd still like to see better finishing, but I'm setting a high bar because he's good enough that we have to continually raise the bar. We've never had anyone for the US with his level of club success so you really can only judge what he's doing against truly elite players. He's head and shoulders above anyone else we have right now and historically, he's already surpassed any club accomplishments our past field players have accomplished. Outside of a bit more consistency (the knock on just about every young player) and some improved finishing and I struggle to think what else we could ask for outside more time on the field and less on the injured list. The last part is likely the key to the whole thing., He keeps healthy and keeps playing and there's little I don't see as possible for him.
Just play a 4-6-0 then. Historically, most of our important goals, by far, have come from midfielders.
the contrarian view would be that maybe Hazard wasn't all he was cracked up to be. I thought he was a picky sort.
Most of those goals had a striker playing an important role. I don't know if a striker needs to be there but I do think someone has to do the job. Most attacking mids and wingers don't seem to want to do the grunt work.
Sounds perfect to me, I don't like Chelsea, but I love Pulisic, the best of both worlds. Chelsea is very serious about adding Havertz to the already stacked attacking trio of Zyeich, Timo and some American dude. That legitimately sounds like one of the best front 4 in all of football. They all play at a breakneck pace as well, Pulisic often looks like he is in a higher gear than his current Chelsea teammates, that is the gear Timo Verner refers to as neutral.
Tesla isn’t bad because acceleration is what separates him from most players. I’ve always thought he looked a bit like The Flash on the TV series and that could be a nickname too but doesn’t quite fit. Back to chocolate Jesus?
Lampard has a reputation as a very intelligent man. One of the hallmarks of intelligence is adaptability --a typical manager does better at first, when he's an unknown quantity to all others, but his success rate declines as he becomes better known and more or less predictable. If Lampard is up to his reputation, he'll be able to re-invent himself every few months, surprising his rivals again and again. While Chelsea's defense lacks, let's keep in mind the transfer window is just opening. There is much time left, and Chelsea is likely to unload several players. It makes sense to go first for the attacking guys, taking advantage of the lower prices due to COVID, since they are always the most pricey. Late in the season, hoping the COVID crisis will soften somehow, they can sell their extra attackers for a higher price and start buying the somewhat cheaper defenders. As for COVID, there's a reason why we've never had an effective vaccine against any of the coronaviruses that have plagued our kind since we started walking on two. As with HIV, we have to get used to a new normal. So far things don't get radically worse (there is a slight chance that happens, but very small), Chelski is doing the right thing: by late August people will be used to the idea that we're going to have not just the usual 500,000 flu deaths around the planet every year, but another million or two (mostly unreported) deaths/year for a few years due to this one.
Looking for support for Lampard’s reputation for being highly intelligent. If you want to keep new normal deaths to a few million, it will be because of a vaccine.