Chelsea Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread 2023/24

I'm Shocked at how little he's spoken about in the media. He's up there with the likes of Makelele and Kante imo. We'll worth the transfer fee.

It was a great win yesterday but I find it hard to get excited as I think Maresca will always revert to his pragmatic control through possession philosophy. If only he could let the handbrake off once in a while he could turn out to be a decent manager.

A valid point

While I agree with you that Maresca's style can be a bit pedestrian at times, we simply can't play the way we did vs Liverpool as we did against the majority of teams that will just sit back. It's a separate point that we need to get better at breaking those teams down, but it's not as simple as play like vs Liverpool and it will get results.

Any advice for me regarding tickets to the Pafos CL game in January. Haven't been to a CL game in a while. Pafos being a 'small' team makes me hopeful tickets will be ok to get. Its for my sons birthday which is this weekend, so dont want to promise him something that I can't deliver on!

Couldn't keep the winning feeling alive..

Great result for The Blues.

Enzo Maresca "increasingly likely to leave Chelse today" according to Sky Sports.

Liam Rosenior who's currently at Strasbourg is odds on (4/5) favorite to take over.

Don't really know how I feel about this, but perhaps a change is excatly what Chelsea (and Maresca) need at the moment.

Edit He's officially gone.

Seems to be a lot of interference from above which doesn't fill me with confidence for however comes in.

Saw a stat earlier that Chalobah has one of the highest pass completions in the league this season. It's no wonder the way they play it over and back between each other. There was so little pace or injection and it looked like the aim was to hope West Ham would just fall asleep eventually.

As soon as Fofana injected some pace we scored a goal.

It was a great win in the end but your be hard pressed to tell the difference between us with Mareseca and Rosenior for the majority of our play. Maybe theres a bit more fight at the moment but style of play hasn't changed one bit.

It takes time to change a system like that, it's not just Mareseca implementing that system, it was also Potch. Rosenior has more time at training with the squad over the next few weeks so there should be a noticeable difference by March, at least. Rosenior also wants the team to press harder and differently to how they've been doing it up to now.

Again another game where they just pass it around for 95% of the game with absolutely no urgency whatsoever.

For the talent on the pitch there seems to be a startling lack of spark or creativity.

The lads play like they are defending a 2 goal lead in every game when we are actually more likely to be 2 down!

I can't decide what was worse, that 5min wobble that let Leeds back into the game, or Palmer missing such an easy tap in at the death.

I don't know what this style of play Chelsea have developed where they enter every game like they have started with a 3 goal advantage. So slow and ponderous!

That said, goal was deserved, should have been a penalty just before with Rice holding a player down with both arms around him, not looking at the ball, raising his arm and elbowing it...checked by VAR and somehow deemed not a penalty 🤷

I read somewhere that Wimbledon are the only top flight club to reach double figures for red cards in a season. Presumably in the "crazy gang" days under Bassett and Gould, when they basically kicked anything that moved. You're mixing in exalted company, chaps!

Yep. Feels like the owners are building a portfolio, not a team.