Barrettinator

What's worse is Watford are actually playing quite well. Won't be shocked to see a Chalobah goal tbh.

Not sure if you're serious. Did you miss the entire 15/16 season?

3-3 actually flatters us. We fully deserved to lose that. Woeful performance. Chance to seal qualification thrown away.

Hazard? Let's not forget that the fans that visit this forum are a very very tiny minority of Chelsea fans. Have you forgotten this banner from 15/16? Hazard isn't immune to criticism. But yes, I agree that we need to take the vileness out of it and focus on the football itself.

This lad should be starting every game for us and the fact that Conte is doing anything but that actually does my head in. Right now, he's our best CB. He'd be a shoe in if he was playing for City.

What does my head in is fans that can't stand any sort of criticism and take it as "not getting behind the team". Even when we were winning, we weren't perfect. Going into the season, we weren't in the best shape either and we certainly didn't have the best squad we could have had. So a lot of the complaints over the weekend haven't just been purely a result of the Palace defeat. It's been a culmunation of different issues. At the end of the day, by the next match after a defeat, fans will get behind the team once again. There's a sweet spot between giving criticism and praising the team that we all need to find. I, myself, tend to be on the criticism side more often than a few others but it has to be said that there are fans never see anything wrong with the team even when we're absolute sh*te (like 15/16) and will almost have your head on a spike for daring to point out flaws. That f**king irritates me, to be fair. Despite the myriad of issues I think that contributed to the Palace loss, we still had a more than good enough team to absolutely take Palace to the cleaners. Especially, you know, since they hadn't scored a goal all season and have been the worst of the worst in the league. So it's fair to say it was also a mixture of having an off day and just pure complacency from the players. Apparently, Conte was fuming at them, so that's good to know. Can't roll out of bed and expect to sleep walk to a win in this league. Silly attitude from them on Saturday. As for the media....well we've never been their favourites at any point in time at all, have we? Even when we won the CL and they should have been happy an English team won it, the narrative was "they didn't deserve it". We won the Europa League the following season and they pretty much turned their stupid noses up at us. Fast forward to last season and United win the same Europa League and they go into full United w**kfest overdrive for days. They love United, they love Liverpool and they love Spurs. That won't change. They used to love Arsenal but not anymore. They certainly love to see Chelsea fail (they love seeing City fail too) so I'm not sure why you're surprised. Nothing new there.

Little bit of sunshine for your day https://streamable.com/vv40r

Apparently lost the ball every four minutes while he was on the pitch. I'm sick of seeing him play at the moment. Needs to not even make the bench. Pedro starting, Musonda on the bench. Not sure why it has taken this long for Conte to realise it. He seems to wait until things start to go tits up before making bold moves and he needs to realise it won't always result in 13 game win streaks and a title.

Already shopping himself to PSG for when he loses the United job then? Excited to see Neymar and Mbappe play LB & RB.

You can add Bakayoko to that list. But when fans like myself complain in real time as the summer passes by, we get called spoilt, plastic, whingey, negative, etc. Any sort of name you can think of. The entire summer it was "It's only June", "It's only July", "There's still 4 weeks left in the window", "A lot of deals get done on deadline day", "We have the best executives in football", "You know nothing about what goes on behind closed doors". We end up with average RWBs and no proper first choice LWB - in fact only one LWB period - and the narrative flipped to "well we had a pretty good window after all, you must feel pretty stupid now". I get sick of fans that try to make you feel ungrateful for pointing out deficiences in the squad/club. Not everyone's got a bloody blindfold on! That said, those questioning Conte's position are silly. He's not perfect obviously but he's definitely not the problem. If we had too top class wingbacks and a proper backup striker (like Conte wanted), we probably would be playing better. He needs to stop selecting Willian and needs to stop benching our best CB but that's by the way. We've spent the odd 300m but sold almost as much so really, we weren't exactly getting stronger. Does my head in. Every time we win the title, we get complacent and another team leapfrogs us. Like clockwork.

Please click on this tweet and read the thread of tweets underneath it. Couldn't have put my opinions into words better than this myself. Conte needs to stop acting like Mourinho if he doesn't want to end up like Mourinho.

Are we all in agreement now that Willian shouldn't be playing ahead of this lad? Or am I still "ridiculous for thinking he should be ahead of an experienced international"?

I'm pretty certain Willian will start the next league game and Musonda won't even make the bench.

When you win the league, you're supposed to strengthen your team, especially your first XI. Didn't do it in 2010, didn't do it in 2015 and it's the same thing here. But oh, I'm just being a whiney little c**t and the board actually put together a fantastic window apparently and everything's all nice and rosy. Going to have a beer or two now.

Not even going to say anything about this match or else the "yer always negative!!!" squad will attack me. Have a lovely evening all!

Not sure what on earth you're on about but it might do you a world of good to take a look at my last few posts and see the point of me bringing Bates up at all. But if you want to be an idiot, go right ahead.

Ah beautiful. I'm a prick for using the exact same logic you used. So what does that make you then? Takes one to know one, I guess. Enjoy!

Not sure why you mentioned Bertrand and Sturridge. We sent Bertrand on loan about 6 times if I'm not mistaken and he still didn't get a proper chance. We shipped him off. And then went out to get the likes of Baba Rahman. Even now, I'd take Bertrand ahead of Alonso. I know Alonso has a lot of fans but there's a reason we were pursuing an actual first choice LWB this summer. You can do the math. Sturridge didn't get a chance either. We kept playing Torres despite him being painfully out of form. No one can say Sturridge was impatient. Tibo literally had to go out on loan for 3 straight years and even win La Liga. If Tibo was playing for Bilbao or Sevilla instead of Atletico and didn't win the league, I'm not even sure we'd have phased Cech out for him and we'd have ended up losing him in the summer of 2014 imo. But that's just speculation on my part. We made the smart decision to go with him. Credit where it's due. Christensen also had to win player of the year twice at Monchenglabach (sp?) to get a decent crack at the first team and even now, he's still sitting on the bench when he could be benching Cahill. It's nice that Conte wants him to play in the middle of the back 3 but there's no way he wouldn't be able to handle LCB, especially when we're currently playing Cahill who's a right footed, much less technical CB at LCB. But that's for another discussion. Thing is, why do our youngsters have to go out and have spectacular seasons on loan to get even a consideration? Sometimes a good or decent season is enough. Why do they have to go and conquer the world to even be considered? That's unfair pressure we put on them. For all the money we've spent over the years on our academy, I can't imagine that the club wouldn't trust that we've actually had a few good first team talents by now. There's a lot more I should say on this but I'm already tired of typing. In the end, I just want to see our youngsters do well. I want to see them achieve their dreams of playing for this club. Some of them joined as 8 year olds and they've lived and breathed CFC their entire lives. They genuinely love this club. You can't buy that. And quite frankly, with Frank, Drog & JT gone, we don't have that in the squad anymore. You know the kind of genuine connection I'm talking about. Maybe Tibo will grow into that some day. Maybe Morata will. Who knows. But it's already ingrained in our youngsters and since they have the talent to go with it, why not give them a proper chance? That's all I have to say for now really. I hope Conte resolves this with Musonda.

Guillem Balague is bottom of the barrel when it comes to football journos. Only one worse than him is Tancredi Palmer. Not really saying much when you mention him tbh.

How do you know it was all down to Bates' decisions then? Did you know the inner workings of the club? Where you in meetings with him? Etc, etc. I'm just using your logic.

90m. Funny. 90m + Rabiot + Verratti and maybe we'll have a discussion. Otherwise, they can f**k off. Thankfully, Kante's not the type who'll easily get swayed by PSG's money. He still drives a Mini ffs.

That's not my point. Willian has been shocking all season. No reason he should be playing tbh. He has done nothing to deserve to start or play games this season and if Musonda wasn't in the squad, I'd understand that Willian's playing because there aren't any other options. But that's not the case. No one's saying he should be instant first choice. That's Pedro's job. But should he be playing ahead of Willian or at least getting some of the appearances Willian has gotten? Most definitely. And it's shocking that a good number of you lot disagree. I still have nightmares from Willian's City performance.

That's not my point. Willian has been shocking all season. No reason he should be playing tbh. He has done nothing to deserve to start or play games this season and if Musonda wasn't in the squad, I'd understand that Willian's playing because there aren't any other options. But that's not the case. No one's saying he should be instant first choice. That's Pedro's job. But should he be playing ahead of Willian or at least getting some of the appearances Willian has gotten? Most definitely. And it's shocking that a good number of you lot disagree. I still have nightmares from Willian's City performance.

I don't believe he's at Pedro's level of course (even though Pedro's been a bit underwhelming this season) but Willian's form has been absolutely shocking to the point where you can't possibly expect Musonda to perform worse. And at that point, what's the worst that could happen? Rather take a chance on the youngster than the 29 year old who's never actually going to get much better. Gareth Bale was almost shipped out of Spurs at some point but they stuck with him. Rashford's a top talent but he was made to look quite ordinary a few times at youth level, including matches against our own youth teams. Still got a crack at the first team. Liverpool gave chances to players like Jordan Ibe, Raheem Sterling and co. Not all of them worked out but they got a Raheem Sterling out of it. We all know no manager trusts youth as much as Wenger so no point even going into that. For all his faults, his record with youth players is very admirable. He has even been too reliant on them in the past. Yes, Kane isn't the norm, but it's not like that was a rare case. There are a lot of players who have bags of talent and have looked underwhelming at some point but all it took was being nurtured under the right conditions for them to put everything together and push on. Madrid do that with quite a number of their youngsters too. They realise the atmosphere at the Bernabeu may not be ideal for a lot of youngsters and they either loan them or sell them with buy back clauses and bring them back when they've gotten proper game time and matured under proper tutelage. It's an unbelievable thing to say but Madrid despite having a more ruthless culture re: managers than Chelsea have managed to integrate a lot more youngsters than we have, especially in the past few years and they're reaping the benefits of it big time now. Not all will work out. But you'll never know the ones that could have worked out if you don't give them a proper crack at it. Josh could have been a regular now if AVB didn't undo all the progress Carlo made with him. But we'll never know now, will we?

Is Drinkwater back? I hope he is. We really need him now. Hopefully Kante's injury isn't that bad. He's super important to the balance of our team and how we play.