Jonty

I would pin the fault for Conte and Mourinho's demise overwhelmingly with the players. I think this is the exception - Sarri shares blame (for his inflexibility) with whoever is responsible for transfers these days (because they have been sh*te for a few years).

Agreed, and there's no point trying to play like City when we have Jorginho, Kovacic and Willian as opposed to Fernandinho, KDB and Sterling. If we want to play this possession-heavy football we need players better suited to it, which means investment.

Probably because whenever he looks up he sees only Higuain in the box surrounded by 6 defenders, while the rest of our team stands around outside the box looking at him.

Some nice passing, perhaps we're being a bit tough on him when Kovacic and Barkley are creating very little also. Would be nice to see Sarri mix things up and have him playing in front of Kante and get him a little more involved, while giving us more defensive shape? There was a reason we didn't deploy Fabregas as a lone holding midfielder and paired him with someone like Matic, feels like this may be a similar situation. The issue just again comes back to Sarri's refusal to mix things up. Edit: Looks like Ernie and Just have made similar points above.

Not sure how he'd slot into that team, if we tried to shaft him onto the wing like Anelka you can only imagine the sulking.

From what I can tell his main positive contribution to the team is that we retain more possession (although this could just be Sarri's tactics vs the more pragmatic Conte/Mourinho). Even if we assume this is true, i'm struggling to really see the benefit, as we always had plenty of possession against lesser teams, and despite having more of the ball in the big games now we're getting torn apart defensively.

Am usually among the last to clamour for a change in manager, but i'm now unsure about Sarri. I'm willing to back him if he tries to change something up - particularly in the midfield which has been atrocious all season, in large part because whichever 2 of Jorginho/Kovacic/Barkley are on the field appear to contribute next to nothing offensively nor defensively. His refusal to try Kante in Jorginho's slot and put the latter on the bench is particularly disappointing in my view. I can sympathise that we've had no striking option until the last week or so, which is not his fault, and that the squad appears in serious need of overhaul. If Hazard stays (which I still think he will), he together with Kante, Kepa and our current starting back four are of sufficient quality to retain (yes I still have faith in our back line despite the last 2 away games, although Alonso may need to go). With Pulisic coming in, and CHO and RLC promoted to more regular minutes, our most urgent need is a striker and a top playmaking midfielder. If Hazard goes we'll also need a top replacement for him. The likes of Willian, Pedro, Giroud, Barkley and Jorginho (and Kovacic if we retain him) are decent bench options but none are good enough to start in my view. It may make more sense to offload a few and bring in some younger options with higher potential. Whether Sarri is the manager to oversee this rebuild or not is of less importance in my opinion, but with his more attacking style of play we really cannot get away with the lack of quality that a Conte or Mourinho could have perhaps patched over.

Amazing performance, can't remember us dominating a world-class side like that in Europe away from home for a long, long time.

A little concerned it seems the press are already trying to spin him into Torres 2.0, hopefully is fast out of the blocks once the season starts.

Especially considering ol' whisky nose deemed him overpriced and chose to buy Kagawa instead.

I hope/think Ake or Kenedy may replace him within the next 12 months, unfortunately Felipe Luis would have been perfect as he was great going forward too, but oh well.

It's a shame he wasn't playing this role for the entire calendar year, it's probably cost him a Balon d'Or. Oh well, next year I suppose.

Also known in German as a whale's vagina.

I don't think Cahill is any better on the ball than Zouma, Cahill's positioning is typically to keep jogging backwards until he's almost in the net, before attempting a last ditch block attempt on the shot. He's played well since changing to a back 3 but the fact remains that Zouma is a far more solid defender. There's probably no need to fix what ain't broken so long as we're winning games and keeping clean sheets, but eventually I think that will be the swap. Or Dave will go to RWB and Zouma will come in at Moses' expense. He's too good to keep out of the team for long, assuming he hasn't lost any of his physicality while injured.

Cannot wait to get BF1 next week, clocked up hundreds of hours on BF4 so I expect this to be a similar drain on all my available free time.