bluedave

It's obviously a monkey gesture, but even so he's just one individual among thousands, he will hopefully be banned for life. Nobody was hurt, nobody died, let's move on (and please stop reading the Daily Mail!).

If he had missed that penalty then I doubt Drogba would be at the top. I could personally never regard him as highly as Zola, mainly because of the poor to average seasons he had at the start and end of his Chelsea career, but also because of the diving and play-acting which I hate to see from a Chelsea player. In other words my vote would go to Zola because he was a genius with the ball and a true sportsman.

Mata, yet another outstanding performance and a brilliant Zola-esque free kick.

I noticed that at the time, wasn't impressed at all to say the least.

Interesting, but to be honest, the language he might have used concerns me less than his basic incompetency as a referee.

Well said, we finished the game 9 against 13 and still gave a good account of ourselves. sh*t happens sometimes, especially against Man U. I'm very surprised to hear how quite several people see Ivan's sending off as understandable, for me, and every sensible person I've spoken to, that was nothing more than yet another blatant dive by Ashley Young.

I was very impressed by how sensible his views were given the teams involved, I have a lot of respect for Gary Neville nowadays.

Clattenburg 3, Chelsea 2. This made me laugh, from Twitter: "Great afternoon for Manchester United fans. Beating Chelsea 3-2 at Stamford Bridge and now having a quick 5 minute walk home" I live in Kent and watched the game surrounded mostly by Man U and lingering Liverpool supporters from the Merseyside derby.

He maybe, possibly, could have been sent off for the first foot-high foul, but the second yellow was a joke. On the positive side, it forces RDM to play Sturridge in midweek, and I'm really interested to see what Sturridge can do.

Ah well that's the impression I got, check Zola's post on the previous page for example. From the sound of it it's not so much the expections on him, but the massive disharmony in the Zenit dressingroom and the reactions of the Zenit players to him (what we actually hear about is likely to be the tip of the ice berg) as a result of his signing. Imagine trying to play good football under those circumstances... I agree the transfer fee could be a factor as well though.

Those three years at Porto where he achieved a greater than 2:1 goal ratio were clearly a fluke, thank the lord we got Moses instead.

The Champion's League by miles, not least because we were the underdogs and the odds were stacked so high against us. It also upset quite a number of people who I particularly enjoyed upsetting,

Let's think about this for a second, hmmm..... no.

I quite liked the first series of American Horror Story, it's not great like Dexter but still decent enough.

Experiencing the bad times only helps you to better appreciate the good times. Success does have its downside though, the emergence of plastic fans driving up ticket prices and preventing core supporters from attending matches is probably the most obvious. I don't want to return to the 'bad times', but I don't fear them either.

I missed that, unbelievable if they did. The highlights were far too short to tell the story of the game, but it was nice to hear them taking us seriously as title contenders at last.

For me that was one of the highlights of the season so far, I just can't praise Mata enough. The reactions of the Spurs fans in the pub was priceless also! Along with the good news about Terry, yesterday was a good day to be a blue.

Nobody with half a brain gives a f**k what they write in the Sun, least of all the writers who are just paid to sh*t-stir. This is great news for common sense. What a nice way to start a match day!

Found this is my email today, it's only alpha at the moment but I really want to play it now: http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/

sh*t timing for us, but agree there's no chance of getting the ban overturned so might as well close the lid on it. It's just a shame that our sport is run at all levels by a shower of idiots.

I agree with you Bluedrake but this has been discussed at length before.

If Sturridge leaves, and I hope he doesn't, then we'll have no choice but to go shopping. Otherwise I think it would be silly to throw more money at another big-name forward when we already have an £18 million striker on loan at (and scoring for) another premiership team. We've also got Lampard, Ramirez, Mikel, Romeu (who can hardly get a game at the moment) and possibly Oscar all able and willing play in one of the two CM positions so don't see any pressing need to strengthen there either. Stability is underrated. We've changed a lot of players in a short time and they need time to get used to playing with each other and to the team's system.

Just a few out of many off the top of my head- Platini/Blatter Rio/Anton Suarez Pepe Busquets Barton El hadji Diouf Ashley Young

I agree about Hodgson, one of the view voices of reason at the moment. Capello showed what he thought about Terry by resigning from his job after the FA stripped him of the captaincy. It says a lot to me that pretty much everybody in football who actually work with Terry and Cole continue to stand behind them despite the Ferdinand/media led sh*t-stiring.

I never knew he has a special training regime, it certainly doesn't show on the pitch which is what matters. I can see him being useful for another two years at least, Bertrand will probably overtake him in the pecking order eventually (not any time soon) but even if he's no longer playing every week it's still useful to have an experienced player like him around.