Jonty

Cech for at least another season, ideally 2-3 more. He should have been in the FIFA XI last year for his performances in winning us both trophies, there's no-one in the world i'd rather have than him right now. He is the Drogba of goalkeepers. In the big games he always steps up.

I think this was posted yesterday elsewhere

From what i've heard Mikel could win it, then he'll go back to being paid an extravagant amount of money to pass the ball sideways and loiter out of position when we're not on the ball week in week out. But it won't matter because hes the ACON best player. Did you hear he's also better than Messi because he won the u-21 player of the year or something 6 years ago?

Got so angry watching him plain ignore that last penalty shout and Ballack screaming in his face, f**k sake. Oh well at they are finding out that corruption is rife throughout European football. It said in the article it was believed that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Surely they're gonna have to investigate Ovrebo eventually. For now, we can laugh at the dippers for being unable to score 3 goals against a team from Hungry that was trying to let them in. What makes it less funny is that their striker that night now plays for us

Well we now have to be leading games by at least 4 goals going into the 85th minute or we're doomed.

You think playing a month of fixtures (or less for most of the teams) every 2 years will evolve their players by the matches being tough and competitive? Those players are playing far tougher and more competitive games in the EPL or Serie A or wherever they are playing.

Why would a smaller European team be odds on to win or draw against one of the top 4 EPL clubs? Unless the bet was made on a particular scoreline but thats a lot harder to fix.

They should send Ovrebo to jail for a long time if he's found guilty of this, the amount of money he could have caused people to lose that bet on that game, as well as the money lost by the club by missing out on the final etc. That kind of fraud should be 20 years minimum.

Well they said it was a match in England in the last 3-4 years, I don't remember many other controversial CL games in England over the past 3-4 years.

Wasn't he playing on the wing when he was doing well? The game that comes to mind when I think of his peak for us was the 3-0 win at Newcastle, I think he was on the wing for that one, tore them apart.

No offence but having never even been to Africa I couldn't really care less over who wins ACON, I just don't understand why this tournament has to happen every year when a far bigger footballing continent like Europe is satisfied with every four.

You questioned my support for the club because you disagreed with me on what formation we started with against Everton? Right-o. I don't really enjoy insulting anyone's intelligence on here because we're all on the same team, but being so offensive to people on your first day while being so blatantly wrong and being disagreed with by the majority of the posters here, did you ever think hey maybe you don't know as much about this subject as you think you do? 1) A 4-3-3 generally has a lone striker, with two wingers playing high up the field. I wouldn't say that Robben or Duff or J.Cole or Malouda or Kalou played as strikers in our 4-3-3, in the same way that Mata wasn't playing as a striker last season. 2) We were ripping teams to shreds, until that United game we'd won every game bar the draw at QPR and scored a lot of goals against some pretty big teams. If you think we deserved to lose that game to United then it's your support for the club and eyesight that should be questioned, even my United supporting friends were disgusted with what we saw that night and didn't even gloat or say a word about it on the drive home from the bar. We let in 2 goals against Spurs but so what? I'll take 4-2's over 2-0's any day, and i'll take either over the sh*te results we're getting right now. Say what you want about the Arsenal game but we controlled that game and took our foot off the gas when we got the lead, if we had needed to i'm sure we could have chased it and gotten more. 3) No-one has to neutralize the threat posed by Torres because he doesn't pose one. We scored 4 goals in our last 2 games so we're hardly finding it difficult to score, even with Torres on the field for the majority of those games, and Hazard and Moses both out. You can't blame the ineffectiveness of our Torres-headed attack on the formation or even the manager, because he's played under 4 different managers in 4 different systems and hasn't succeeded under any. 4) I'm assuming you never actually watched us play under Carlo when we scored all those goals, because Mata is nothing at all like Frank Lampard, the extent of their similarities is that they are both good at passing and both good at shooting from the edge of the area, after that Mata is a player you want as close to the striker and the center of the action as possible, and Frank is a player who comes up from deep. If you have Mata starting from that deep by the time he gets high up the field enough to influence things, the entire defence will be set, not to mention that Mata's defending (which is a big part of a midfielders job, especially in a 4-3-3), isn't anything to brag about. I'm gathering you assume if we go back to the same tactics of the 2010 season, despite having a completely different squad, that we will instantly get the same results. Alright, you'd be better off giving your advice to the FSW because he'd be the only one so daft as to take it on board.

He was playing this well at the start of last season under AVB, let's see if he can be consistent this time.

The main reason Frank would be better than JT is because he's off at the end of the season. When a new manager comes in next season, if it's not Jose, it could be quite awkward/tense in the dressing room with JT having to bow down to the guy that just took his job. We all saw how happy they were with AVB.

Chalobah won the FA England youth player of the year if that's any consolation.

I'd trade a loss against Brentford for him getting sacked in a heartbeat. We're not going to win the cup with him in charge anyway, only difference it will make is to our end of season league standing, I'm very worried about our top 4 chances right now.

There's no way of proving they couldn't have won without Ovrebo, if only the ref was involved and Barca aren't implicated, it won't mean a thing. That being said it will be very interesting to see the list of fixed matches if they are released.

What are they going to do if it was fixed? Take away Barca's 2009 CL medal? I don't think so. Either way the damage was done, Ballack and Anelka and Co. never got the CL medals they deserved, Barca went on to become the best team ever, we now have the waiter in charge. It may give us a moral victory but meh.

Nigeria take the lead just before half time, I wish they'd f**k off and lose so Moses can come back.

As intelligent and witty as your post is, if you'd bothered to read my post you'd see i'd complimented the way they move the ball around, not Bale's shooting ability. Moving on, just switched onto the ACON coverage on Eurosport and I see Drogba playing for Ivory Coast, first time i've seen him play since the CL final, might just watch this instead of City - Liverpool.

I think we'll win this one, 3-1.

Buck is an American lawyer with no experience in football and from what i've seen he didn't even care for the sport. So how the hell he is chairman of one of the worlds biggest clubs is beyond me.

I'm only 20 but I seem to be less disillusioned than a lot of the people on here. And my disillusionment isn't so much at how much of a failure this season has been and the FSW (although that is a bit of it), but it's more because of how sh*t this club is run and because it doesn't look like it's going to be fixed any time soon.

Rooney will probably end up breaking Shearer's record for most EPL goals (around 260 or something I think), but this is one record Frank will always have gotten first.

We played a 4-3-3 for the first 20 minutes against Everton and even by the FSW's incredibly low standards, it was a shambles of a 20 minutes and we were lucky to not be 3-0 down (were only 1-0 down). Mata is wasted out on the wing, a 4-2-3-1 is the right formation for us offensively, we just need a proper defensive midfielder. edit: As Adam said above, at the start of the season with a good manager and the fans behind the team and confidence at its peak, we were ripping through everyone including United, Arsenal and Spurs.