bertie blue

No it wasn't Matic was terribly inconsistent for the majority of his time at Chelsea. 

I can't subscribe to that. After his performance in the F.A Cup final, I never wanted to see him play again. Out of all the great performances last season, he was the weak link, sloppy, slow, rigid, covered well, physical presence, that was it, he had legs on Fabregas. Do you really think Conte was desperate to keep him? 
At a time I thought he was amazing, but that time came and passed when he failed to return to his form of 2014.

Good luck to Conte........he is going to need it.
We will have a chance of winning the league and winning a cup, but only ...........If Conte can bring in about 6 "hard working".new players......they must be very hard working attitudes, obviously talented and they must be willing to show some leadership skills and have bags of football character .........................we need a new goalkeeper, a proper hard man experienced right back, a holding defensive midfielder, a leader central defender, a number 10 and a top classy striker, all at reasonable prices........and most importantly we clear out any players that have an attitude problem, thinking they are bigger than Chelsea football club.

I'll skip all the football's not played on paper stuff, and make a note of it next time my local pitch gets soggy in the rain.
I don't disagree that ideally you build upon what you have- especially when it was clear that we were no nearer being good enough in europe (i.e. there was still obvious ways in which to improve).
 
many people on here felt the two positions where we could improve upon in the first eleven were at center back and on the right. we tried for stones and failed and we tried for pedro and succeeded. anyway it wasn't enough.
 
relative to city's transfers I think you could expect us to no longer be favourites for the title. it is at this point where the board deserve criticism. we went from the best side on paper to probably the second best, and squad wise there was no longer much in it among the top three or four sides. this alone means that the board have failed to a degree. it would explain us not winning the league.
 
it does not explain us being where we were when jose was sacked. if we were on course to finish fourth at the moment then jose would still be manager and we would purely be talking about the club looking to repeat the 2014 window and avoiding the 2015 one. as it is we're now talking about large scale rebuilding as we coast to tenth. it is at this point right here where jose deserves his criticism. you haven't actually told me what form / league position you think was acceptable from this squad under jose's management given the circumstances you've outlined. nor have you named any of the people who think conte doesn't need to spend. I am very interested to know. 
 
under ancelotti in his second season we lost a lot of first team players and replaced them with kids, benayoun and ramires. we finished 2nd.
 
and you're right to pre-empt me on the point of motivation. because ultimately it is entirely the manager's responsibility for the form of the team. always has been, always will be. 

I'd love a link to those posts if you could find them. I too have written about the path he took to get here and compared it to Sammer's arrival at Bayern so it would be interesting to see if our accounts line up at all.
 
I agree that he didn't appoint himself and that was my primary point. I've been critical of the board and Roman in particular and the appointment of Emenalo to this position when he had absolutely no track record that would suggest he would be a competent candidate is one of the points I've raised a few times.
 
Regardless I'm happy to judge him on what he's done and his time and where this club has gone.
 
 
This is a very flawed premise because I've said that Jose was at fault for a number of issues this season, but I think the squad was weakened over the summer and that really doesn't fall at his feet. 
 
 
That's a good point. People like Ballack and Drogba were older but I didn't just say leadership, I said character. I think this is a wider issue on the type of players we recruited after the 2012 season but in my opinion we've lost a certain type of player at this club. You may say leadership is hard to define in a quantifiable sense, but anyone who has played sports or worked for a reasonable amount of time knows what that indefinable quality is. Some might call it bottle but it's gone and when you look at the fact that we let people like Drogba and Cech go last summer, there's a case that they are exactly the types of players we failed to bring in.
 
 
I agree with people like Sir Alex Ferguson who say that when you win the league you need to improve your squad with 2-3 top class signings and I think we'll both agree that we didn't do that. Going back to my previous point of the types of players we lost and the dealings in general, we weakened the squad and that sent out the wrong message in my opinion. There was a distinct lack of ambition to our signings and that really seemed to set the mood at the club. There were also questionable decisions made over pre-season and some players simply started the season overweight and unfit (Costa has said as much).
 
That to me was where the season was lost, and the thing is anyone who watched us from mid-January onwards knew we needed to improve. The PSG games exemplified that but we didn't improve, in fact we regressed in my opinion and you simply can't do that in such a competitive league. 
 
 
This is just you doubling down on your error of bringing up the hiring of a well-respected man who had a track record of excellence in his field in comparison to Michael Emenalo. It's not even about my opinion of him (although I share it) or me having met the guy and seen a Powerpoint presentation of his (I actually have!), but the widely held view that he is one of the leading people in his field who had experience before being hired by us.
 
The reason no-one criticised him is exactly because of that and as I said, it's the perfect example of how we should be behaving as a club rather than hiring Roman's mate's proteges (a very similar argument about Emenalo could be levelled at Avram although he at least at experience as a coach, if not the requisite qualifications).
 
 
Another faulty premise because I don't think that. What I believe is that you need the best people possible working together in concert towards a shared aim, and I don't think we have that at this moment in time.I especially don't think we had that when Jose returned as manager and the one person who seemed to realise was rather surprisingly Emenalo, who tendered his resignation. 
 
Now I'm not using him as a scapegoat because I think the problems actually go beyond him. Roman needs to take a step-back but he probably won't, so the best you can hope for is a stronger presence in the Technical Director role. What we have now is a guy who was appointed not because of what he had done, but because of whom he knew and I don't agree with that in any walk of life to be honest. If we want to return to the top of the European game then I think we need to change the way we behave, and that starts with a review of everyone in the club.
 
Conte can't do much if the machine itself doesn't change because it becomes just another short-term fix for long-term fundamental problems. But if you disagree then that's fine. There's nothing to say that either one of us is right or wrong.

Good point.
 
How do you think Conte will cope with a ready-made platform of money, prestige and influence to build on at this club which is an underperforming giant with a huge wage budget that had finished 1st before this anomalous season? 

On occasion I read Corriere dello Sport.. there seems a little undercurrent of bitterness (my Italian is poor so I might be difficult to be a proper judge on that) about Chelsea which is unusual, Chelsea have traditional had quite positive press in Italy from what I have read. But interesting headline today is  (Badly Translated)
 
"On order in the Chelsea Restaurant 
Pogba, Nainggolan, and dreaming of Higuain"
 
Probably nonsense however good to be at the top table again in terms of transfers 

Morals?
 
Well, nice to have and all.....but I'd rather have someone in the squad who is an immoral fighter rather than certain players whose moral issues include essentially being a thief every time they collect their pay cheque ( I was always told that if you get paid for a job without actually doing it, you're no better than a thief....i believe it too)

i think many of you are in hyperbole mode here regarding him. "net negative"? seriously? he was one of the main instrument of our title last season, and even though he was awful the first few months this season, he has been improving ever since. without him, we would definitely be in worse position than where we are right now

i don't deny that costa is a dirty player, but he has been working on his emotion after the incident earlier this season (i don't remember what exactly). but we need to understand it's not exactly easy with the media and opposition players bullying you all the time, not to mention now even many chelsea fans seem to oppose him

do you not remember how drogba was diving a lot? did you judge him as "a complete w*nker"? were you lot "embarrassed" and "want him out of the club"? the point is, chelsea was never (and still isn't) a virtuous and saintly club

I totally understand that perspective. I just think the passion that he offers, as well as the quality of his play and his quite brilliant goalscoring record, is just about enough to offset that.
 
Let's not pretend we don't have a history of having players with an edge (which is my way of saying occasionally filthy) either. I was raised on stories of hardmen and Wisey was the first skipper I remember. 
 
Costa is a problem when he gets frustrated and on Saturday it wasn't just that the opposition winding him up that was the issue, it was the fact he was isolated up-front and had no real support from his teammates in anyway. Back in the day he'd have had JT or Lamps in his ear, and players actually getting forward to support him.
 
I don't really want to discard the one player who has actually made an effort in the last few months. I think we need to see what he's like under Conte and in a better team first.

I think with Costa we have to understand his character isn’t going to change overnight or maybe not at all. He is the kind of player who is always going to be walking the tight rope of what’s accepted as sporting aggression and unacceptable behaviour.
We knew this when we signed him and when he was banging them last season in it was largely overlooked, this season he started like a slob…overweight and dire so there was no goals or glory to take the heat off his antics. I slaughtered him at that time and wanted him sold, credit to him he turned it around and got back in shape and into form.
He’s always going to shove his face into opponents, square up to them and pretty much wrestle with anyone who tries to stop him scoring goals, what we have to ask ourselves is do the positives (goals, effort, desire..) outweigh the negatives with Costa?
I mean if we had CL football and were in the top end of the table then sure we could maybe go out and bring in a Lewandowski (sp) or the likes but that’s not going to happen due to where we are. Who could come in next and score the goals to take us back to the top? I don’t think there is anyone more efficient than Costa tbh. Of course that all might not matter if he wants to go which we also need to prepare ourselves for.
Role model wise he’s not a good example to set for our younger players and fans in certain respects but then neither are the divers, play-actors and so on that litters the best sides in Europe. Don’t get me wrong if he starts biting (he didn’t) punching and being a Suarez I want nothing to do with him, he’s not violent or dirty...he’s just easily wound up and likes to put himself about.
For us right now I don’t think it’s a popularity contest…we need leaders and players who change games…Costa is one of very few who fit into that IMO.

Yeah I can understand that. I watch him with grown men who are able to understand nuanced characters in a way 7 year olds can't. It's a bit of a slippery slope though, if we judge our players as a 7 year old might.
 
There's things about his character I dislike and things I absolutely love so it comes down to individuals deciding on their own, weighing the good against the bad. The bad is undeniable at times, but the guy is one of the few showing the passion and dedication that we want isn't he?

We must keep him, we aren't going to attract anyone as good without European football!
I think it's pretty obvious he's leading the team, against PSG he was the only one who had a desire and passion to win. He took the bull by the horns and fought to the very end, but his team mates let him down and PSG was too good for him to do it all himself.
Without Costa we're completely spineless.

I can see why the aggression might be a bit much for some and I'd love him to calm down a bit but in terms of representing the shirt and doing it justice, he's doing that more than anyone at the moment. He's leading that team and it was clear to see in the Paris game. He did that shirt proud and he's been doing that since the turn of the year when plenty of others really don't look like they could give a damn.

Unfortunately he did significant damage to the club this time round and that leaves a sour taste in the mouth. He also tried to play (some of) the supporters like a violin near the end - cynical and unacceptable. Of course he had some self appointed spokespersons to assist.
I never liked, or agreed with Wenger taking his moral higher ground stance on Jose but I do not wish to see him at the club ever again.

Ok beg to differ,but when he slags of Chelsea fans and applauds palace fans, I personally found that offensive. But let's see how much his affection for us shows when he lords up his 'dream job' at 'the biggest club in the world' just my opinion. I loved the man at first but now he's gone I don't miss his bitchy sniping or embarrassing press conferences. Each to their own and all that.

Expected to be our manager within the next ten days according to Sky Sports News

Happy with that, hopefully he's as good as the last Italian in the dugout here. Welcome Antonio!

i have no doubt that wilkins getting fired cost carlo back to back prems

No thanks don't want him back. His sacking for me was closure for me in all honesty. I saw a side to him this season that I really didn't like and with so much negative press coupled with soooo many defeats, he needed the sack. I love him for what he has done but his special one status faded and it was all self inflicted which is the sad thing.

as a manager he is never going to go more than 3 or 4 seasons, maybe if he managed a national team he might last longer but at club level he just loses it. if he ever came back again we would be a laughing stock !!

I have heard that line a lot and to an extent I do agree. No club has the devine right to expect success every season so I think if we had struggled and ended up with nothing this season it wouldn't have been a major problem. As you say, he had earnt it.
 
But there are bum seasons and BUM seasons! We were playing some shocking football - couldn't buy a win and were looking very much relegation candidates. And if that wasn't bad enough, there were the problems with officials, players, medical staff - it was just a complete car-crash of a situation that didn't really show any signs of improving.
However good a manager is (or may have been), I don't think anyone could expect to survive that.
 
I didn't want Jose to go, hoped he would build a dynasty etc, but for the record, in December I had serious concerns that we could get relegated this season. I don't now have such concerns.

God no. He had to go. An antiquated, outmoded manager, a tactical coward and an unhealthy presence for any club. 
 
His time as a top manager is over and if he doesn't have a re-think and reinvent himself, then it will stay that way.

After this season, Roman will never hire him again, and neither should he.

Never say Never.
 
But it's Never Gonna Happen.

Personally I don't think it will happen at least not so soon as there will be too many question marks about resigning Jose a third time, whether these questions are tactical, man management related or just public image as his resigning would no doubt turn us back into the media's go to villain. Yes he is still a great manager and I will hate seeing him elsewhere and wanted him to be the future at the club but I just don't think its possible.
Admittedly you have quite rightly pointed out there isn't many top tier managers that would be available as options, so I wouldn;t rule it out completely, but there is one (and in my eyes is top tier) manager I can think of who has done it here before and who is in charge now and probably deserves at least the option of signing on, Guus Hiddink. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing him signing a 2 or 3 year contract, even better if we are following along the lines of Man U and are preparing a Terry, Lampard or Drogba to take over long term. This is what I'd currently like to see and I hope it comes to fruition.