Pat Nevin: Change and consistency

Each so-called big team in the Premier League still seems intent on having a period of struggle this season. Arsenal had their wobble before coming out of it against Leicester. The 5-2 scoreline managed to hide the fact that, but for the woodwork, they could have been 3-0 down before they even scored their first goal. Man City have taken it on themselves to have a little dip over the past few weeks as well, culminating in an extraordinary second-half capitulation at White Hart Lane. Man United sit top of the pile right now, but do they really look that impressive? So if this carries on then this will be a season to hang on, dig in and refuse to get despondent.

With just over 10 minutes to go at St James’ Park, the writing seemed to be on the wall once again at our most notable bogey ground. A couple of changes and a sudden burst of pace, impetus and belief led to a salvaged point. As much as anyone, Ramires has had a huge influence over the past week. His play against Walsall, including a goal and an assist, gave Jose Mourinho pause for thought. When he looked along his bench he hoped the Brazilian would have a similar influence in his cameo at the weekend. He wasn’t disappointed.

Ramires' second goal of the week was obviously a cracker lashed in from 20 yards, but just as vital was his determination to attack Willian’s superb free-kick which became the equaliser against Newcastle. Without Ramires running across the line of the ball, the excellent Tim Krul would certainly have saved it. So what it does do is seriously bring ‘Rami’ into the boss’s mind before he sends in the team sheet at the Dragao tonight.

I do not want preferential treatment, just some fair and balanced reporting. nevin_round

The tactics for this one are also worth considering. The normal 4-2-3-1 might have to be adapted against a Porto team that is riding high on confidence. Will the sitting two be Matic and Fabregas? It may be that a place has to be found for Ramires somehow, either in there or even as one of a midfield three in a 4-3-3. When things aren’t going swimmingly, Jose Mourinho has never been afraid of change. Tonight will be a real battle and there will be periods when Jose’s old club have more possession and even decent advantage in time spent in attacking areas. Having looked closely at Porto, I reckon they are a very good team on their day and this will be a huge test for us in a stadium with an incredible, partisan atmosphere.

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Whether or not they play tonight it was intriguing to see both Ramires and indeed Mikel being so dominant and controlling against Walsall. Of course they should be a class above their lower-league opponents, but it felt more like a chasm than a gap. There is a decent argument that it was Mikel’s most complete performance in a Chelsea shirt. It had everything: from winning every single tackle and showing great energy breaking up play, to playing an array of defence-splitting passes that recalled anyone from Andrea Pirlo to Glenn Hoddle!

It is great to see that attitude from players fighting to get back into the team. There should always be that work ethic of course, but the confidence levels were superb from both - and that is before considering the fine work done by Ruben Loftus-Cheek and the sparkling contributions from Kenedy. A goal and assist from the latter really was a big reminder to the manager to consider him more regularly as a starter. I suspect his time will come very soon.

You can say anything with statistics - that is now three wins and a draw from the last four games - but you can just as easily paint a less rosy picture. Certainly the manager didn’t think he was viewing anything like a masterpiece in the first half at Newcastle, but there are positives bubbling under. Maybe this is why Jose looks quite relaxed most of the time; he can see that there may well be a few options on the horizon.

One option not available in the league for a while is Diego Costa. I am not going to go on a soapbox again, except for one point a few Chelsea fans alerted me to. There is footage out there of Gabriel lashing out at Marko Arnautovic when Arsenal played Stoke. These things happen of course but he did connect violently in retaliation. I am not calling for a retrospective ban on the Arsenal defender as some form of rough justice; I just want some fair and balanced reporting.

Had Diego Costa done the same thing there would have been a media witch hunt on the back pages, radio and TV shows and probably all the way to the national news. For Gabriel’s misdemeanour caught on camera, there was something approaching a media blackout. Is this fair? So no, I do not want preferential treatment, just fair and even coverage please. I am just getting fed up with certain areas of the media bouncing the FA into action when it suits them!

Rant over and on to last week’s quiz. The last time Chelsea played Wallsall AWAY from home was in September 1992 when goals from Dennis Wise, Eddie Newton and Andy Townsend secured a 3-0 win. There can only be one winner from the correct answers of course, and this time the lucky fan is Gareth D.A. Platt from Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland. Well done and we will get the prize out to you as soon as we can.

This week the question is again from the master quiz-setter Iuri Mantachik from Minsk, Belarus. He asks: how many players from the current Porto squad have ever played under Jose Mourinho's management? Answers as ever to me at [email protected]

The lucky winner randomly chosen from the correct answers will receive a Season Review DVD signed by one of the players. And of course anyone who sends in a question I use gets a mention!

Good luck with that and to the team in what will be a tough one tonight.

- Pat will be in the Chelsea TV studio later for Matchnight Live which will bring you all the build-up to our game with Porto. It starts at 6.30pm.

Pat make a lot of sense.

Essential Pat

Pat Nevin: Staying strong and being brave

Chelsea legend Pat Nevin is being asked a lot about his former club at the moment. In this week’s column he writes that his answers highlight the tried and the tested…

Wasn’t it great to see the Chelsea Ladies team win the league on Sunday after the pain they had to endure on the last day of last season? I would like to write the rest of today’s article about them, their great day and their fantastic play. I suspect however you would think I was rather ducking certain other issues! So well done to Emma Hayes and her side for putting a well-needed smile on Chelsea faces, when recently worried and even stunned looks have been the order of the day.

I wish I could find someone who predicted and knows why our start to the season has been so much different from those we have grown used to. After winning the league only a few short months ago the change is incomprehensible to most people. In fact the most common question I have been asked in the street, online, on the TV and on radio for well over a month has been simple, what has happened to Chelsea? The follow-up question is usually, what is the reason?

Much to my, your and everyone’s disappointment I have to admit I really do not have a simple answer to the problem. I do however know one thing I am definitely positive about. It isn’t just a single, easy-to-spot, obvious problem. Trust me, if it was, Jose Mourinho would have spotted it and fixed in a heartbeat.

Clearly some of our best players are not playing to the best of their ability; that never helps and this week the manager also mentioned a mental fragility. What that translates to is a dip in confidence for a few and that of course can affect the entire group. Then you try to delve a little deeper and find out why the dip in confidence has happened and of course this is an altogether less-easy question to answer. This is all very vague I know and not giving the succour of a simple easy fix. If I was however looking for one man to find that fix and implement it, fortunately I reckon we have got the right man in the right place doing the searching.

"Jose Mourinho hasn’t said he is enjoying the current predicament, but there is something about him that tells me he is relishing the challenge."

I must admit it took me a week to realise that when people were asking me what has gone wrong this season, it was actually a rhetorical question. They really wanted to tell me what they thought was the core problem. There have been a myriad of ideas from the practical to the preposterous. Actually the conspiracy theories have been in an odd way quite entertaining, but only up to a point.

In any case and whatever the base of the malaise, there are few routes out other than the tried and tested. You work hard in training both physically and mentally. You look at any errors, analyse them and try to rectify them as soon as possible, specifically before the next game.

There is of course the option of changing things around via personnel or of course tactics and systems. Jose will certainly be considering these options right now and it is helpful to have a free international week to really get to work on any serious adaptations that have to be made. It may be that none are made and it is more about finding a way of instilling that little bit of missing confidence in the group.

Having been there before, many years ago when the team was having a bad time, I can remember that even the players had no good idea what the base of the problem was or why it wasn’t turning around. Actually like everyone else, each player had an idea but it was always different from everyone else’s in the team. Strangely no player felt they were the main part of the problem. This is why you have to look to the manager who can oversee things with the clearest eye. I suspect Jose has a clearer eye and mind than most at the moment, despite what you may read or hear elsewhere.

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You will tend to find talented and successful people are the ones who are quite calm in the middle of what looks like a crisis. They know that panicking is not an option or certainly not a sensible one at this point. When Jose has talked, he hasn’t said he is enjoying the current predicament, but there is something about him that tells me he is relishing the challenge.

There are many things that are against the team at the moment. One of which is that in a difficult run you normally secure the defence, pack out the midfield and become hard to beat. But when the points gap has quickly grown, this is not actually easy to do, because we are already chasing the pack. There is also the fact that teams still see Chelsea as a major scalp and raise their games accordingly. This is not a complaint, just a fact and it makes it harder. There is also the brutal truth that some of the fear factor has dissipated for the opposition each week. It takes years to grow that feeling but it can slip away quickly. It hasn’t totally gone yet, but we certainly need a few wins quickly to get inside the heads of weaker-minded opponents before the games start.

It remains a time for big personalities, strong characters and brave men. You find out about people not during the good times but during the harder times. The fans have stood strong at the Bridge under pressure, the players will have to do so between now and Christmas. This is no time to be looking around for help; it is the time for you to help others around you. Oddly enough when a player considers it that way, he often can forget about his own little lack of confidence and concentrate on the wider team ethic.

As a team you must find a positive. The most positive aspect I can find is that even though it has not been good we are only seven points off fourth place. That is something to aim for in the short term.

Last week in the quiz I asked which Porto players had previously played under Jose Mourinho. There is only one, the famous former Real Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas. A number of other entrants rather brilliantly suggested Helton Arruda, but his times at Uniao de Leiria and Porto just failed to overlap with Jose’s time at both clubs. There of course can only be one winner and this week it is Alexandre Kononchuk from Zaporozhye in Ukraine.

This time it is a tricky little question, could you tell me which Chelsea player started his career with Dreams? Answers as ever to me at [email protected] The randomly chosen winner from the correct answers will receive a Season Review DVD signed by one of the players.

Good luck and enjoy the international break. Personally the pressure of being a fan will not leave me as I will be at the Scotland v Poland game which will go a long way to decide if my beloved home country makes it out of the group stages. I am hoping my country can somehow stop Robert Lewandowski, and you think Chelsea have problems!

Pat Nevin: Sticking together

COLUMN TUE 3 NOV 2015

In his column this week, Chelsea legend Pat Nevin writes about how the attitude of the fans in testing circumstances is an important strength of this club…

I find it hard thinking about Saturday’s game against Liverpool, never mind writing about it. It was another chance to get back on the straight and narrow and after four minutes it looked like the nerves would be settled and we could start playing with a load more confidence. As it turned out we needed a second goal to really give the team that lift and just as importantly to take away Liverpool’s hope.

At 1-0 it was still a good position but those extra two minutes and 40 seconds added by the referee to the first half, made a huge difference. Liverpool had the huge psychological lift and they used it well. I could go on, and the Lucas situation in particular was patently ridiculous on the officials’ part, but there is nothing to be gained by moping. Fortunately there is another game tomorrow and as usual it is a huge one.

Against Kiev in Ukraine we looked very good for about 70 minutes and were extremely unlucky not to have put the game to bed. -

Before talking about that it is worth reiterating the general feeling at the ground on Saturday as the referee blew the final whistle. Yes, there was huge disappointment but while working for the BBC it was noticeable that many broadcasters alongside me were surprised by the lack of vitriol, or even just a little anger. At most other top clubs there would be fury raining down from the stands from the majority of the fans, irate with the players and indeed the manager after another defeat and such a poor league position. That was not the general feeling at all. Disappointment and maybe a bit of shock, but they/you were still singing Jose’s name and letting the team know the fans were not going to turn on them.

Of course there will be some who do not feel that way and will want to vent their spleens and I fully understand that, but they were very much in the minority on Saturday. So why are the Chelsea fans being so understanding, so forgiving and even so reserved under such extremely testing circumstances?

Well those of a certain vintage have been here before more than once and as I have often said, they understand there are good and bad times in football. Also clearly Jose is held in such high regard for what he has done here and elsewhere he is given rightful respect and a whole load of patience. There is however something else that I think might be having an effect on the attitudes of Chelsea fans at the recent games. With such a high level of consistent campaigning in the media about our manager, they do not want to give the gratification of showing that ‘even the fans are turning on Jose’. This isn’t so far-fetched as an idea, fans can self-police as a group. I know one group of fans who are ridiculously well-behaved and happy even in defeat, and part of that is to show up another group of rival fans who weren’t always the best behaved in the past. I wonder who I could be referring to here?

Tomorrow night will undoubtedly be the same, the fans will be there in numbers, there will be a big old Champions League roar and I guess that if we score and then win in this one, it will be an even bigger celebration than a ‘normal’ Champions League success.

Dynamo Kiev are a good side and they will certainly have had a lift from our defeat at the weekend. It has been noticeable that teams are now turning up at the Bridge without a hint of an inferiority complex. Dynamo need a win in this one, so they will almost certainly be in attack mode, something we didn’t see for years from most Champions League visitors. It used to be the case that they would turn up in west London, park the bus and hope for the odd speedy break. Times have changed, but we have to be able to cope with it.

This of course is great if you happen to be a neutral looking in, as it makes it unpredictable and pretty exciting. As usual during a tough time, most of us would take a boring, uneventful 1-0 win right now, just to ensure we get out of the group unscathed.

I just hope that our decent midweek form continues. Against Kiev in Ukraine we looked very good for about 70 minutes and were extremely unlucky not to have put the game to bed. At Stoke we were by far the better side throughout and Eden Hazard in particular had many very special moments. The missed penalty was a travesty for the man-of-the-match performance he had put on.

Eden himself is very hard to read right now, as lively as he was at Stoke he was inversely subdued against Liverpool. I thought a corner had been turned and even before the Liverpool game as he warmed up I thought, ‘He looks good, he looks up for it.’ In the little possession sessions 30 minutes before the game he was jinking and tricking his way effortlessly past the rest of the Chelsea team. I remember myself on those occasions, that if I was in that impudent totally confident mode in the warm up, it usually meant I was probably going to be on great form during the 90 minutes, as long as I got enough of the ball in some decent areas. So it is there and can come back again at any point for Eden.

So let’s hope he gets that recent midweek form back for this one, as a win here will most likely lead to a place in the knockout rounds of the Champions League. A defeat and this season could start looking a very long drawn out battle, with limited amount of glamour to look forward to in comparison to what we have been used to. That said, I bet the Chelsea fans would still stick with the team.

Pat Nevin: Conversion conversation

In this week’s column, Chelsea legend Pat Nevin considers how an end may come to some weird weeks…

Have you ever had that bad dream when you try to run away from something but your legs just don’t seem to work? No doubt there is some deep Freudian psychology at work for those of us who have had that night-time horror at some point in our lives. There is nothing you can do, it doesn’t matter what you try, you just cannot escape. Whether it is a bog-standard childhood monster or a big, burly full-back that is chasing you, he is catching you, your rubber legs are useless and you just can’t seem to get away.

It feels a bit like that watching Chelsea at the moment, our lads can have 60 or 70 per cent of the possession, we can have most of the chances but we just can’t seem to get away from other teams. We have outplayed Stoke twice in just over a week, bossed them for large periods of the games at their stadium and what have we come away with? The square root of nothing.

There have been posts hit, chances missed, penalty opportunities squandered along with a few one-on-ones and still we can’t get over the line. I could accept this if it was in a weird sort of dream, but it isn’t, though it sometimes feels like a real-life living nightmare.

"If we spotted it then I am sure the boss is already working on it."

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The win against Kiev last week felt like a turning point, a whole bunch of chances and a huge amount of attacks that lead to a load of crosses from the byline, but there were few of those opportunities taken. We did however get a winner from Willian and it looked like the corner had been turned. It hadn’t, Stoke brought back the current reality that feels like a warped unreality.

Jose wasn’t physically present at the Britannia Stadium at the weekend but his presence seemed to be everywhere, even if it only manifested itself in cardboard cut-outs. I just wonder how much difference his presence would have actually made as the forces against us seem positively occult at the moment.

Actually, I was beginning to worry about outside sources in all areas. For a while now I haven’t received a single email on my Chelsea FC address. Usually there are hundreds, sometimes thousands every week but anyone trying to get in touch, please accept my apologies, I am not being rude and I am not ignoring the world or burying my head in the proverbial sand because of a few bad results. It has been a technical issue that should be rectified soon.

So it was generally accepted that many parts of the play were pretty decent against Stoke at the weekend. Obviously having more possession of the ball helped but in the simplest terms we didn’t convert enough good possession into goals, just as we didn’t the previous Capital One Cup game against Mark Hughes’s side.

Maybe one thing did however jump out from the games. I was analysing the match for Irish television station Setanta in Dublin and I couldn’t help noticing that against Stoke, like Kiev beforehand, we had loads of possession in the final third, got into great positions and even had superb cutbacks but not enough players in the danger area to convert those chances. I finished the show on Saturday at 10pm and trudged back to my hotel room and lo and behold, Alan Shearer said precisely the same thing on Match of the Day. If we both spotted it and many of you have then I am sure the boss is already working on it.

I noticed, as many did, that Frank Lampard was discussing it on UK TV. First of all I felt sorry for him that in his new role, right away, he has to try to deal with his beloved Chelsea’s bad run. He had his own thoughts, but subliminally there must have been Chelsea supporters watching who were thinking, ‘now if we had a player who was world-class at arriving late in the danger area, we would probably still be in and around the top four right now, somebody like er…Frank Lampard was.’

The problem is there aren’t that many around in world football like Frank Lampard was so he is pretty hard to replace. Of course he wasn’t going to last forever but seeing him doing analysis after the game does rather drive it home when a young Frank in blue would be a big part of the answer to all the current questions.

Jose and the team have to look to the present and the future. The positives are that there has been some improvement but the negatives are still very visible. I suspect the boss has a good handle on precisely what they are now; the problem is finding the answers and finding them soon.

It would of course be remiss not to mention the sad loss of Bobby Campbell. I worked under Bobby at the very end of my Chelsea career for a very short time and to be honest only really got to know him over the past five years. We met most weeks in the Chelsea Club at the back of the Matthew Harding Stand, often with his lovely wife and his son. As a person he was always a real joy to be in company with and was constantly generous with his praise and also advice when it was sought. He will be sorely missed around the club, by everyone who came across him. Our thoughts are of course with his family.

So I am going to attempt the quiz again this week. I will ask the same question as a few weeks back now answers can come through this time. Could you tell me what the score was the first time Chelsea played in Ukraine in a competitive European game? The lucky winner picked correctly from the right answers will receive a DVD signed by one of the players. Please enter your answers below.

Pat Nevin: Here and now

COLUMN TUE 5 JAN 2016

While former Blue Pat Nevin and the current team can be allowed to reflect briefly on a good game at the weekend, it should mostly be all eyes forward to the future, as he explains in his first column of 2016…

Well it is the start of a new year and a pretty good start for the Blues down at Selhurst Park I thought. One of my friends said to me that 2015 had been a terrible year for Chelsea, but to be fair he had real difficulty standing up the argument that it had been one of the worst years in the club’s recent history. Yes there had been problems in the second half of the year, but any year that includes winning the Premier League and the League Cup can’t really be considered awful can it?

I would accept it was a rollercoaster year so I suppose you can take it whatever way you like but now would seem as good a time as any to look forward rather than back. You always have to do that in football anyway; in fact that inability to look back, rest on your laurels or live off past glories is so entrenched it takes years, if not decades to get over even when you leave the game.

Phrases such as: ‘You’re only as good as your last game’ or indeed ‘your next game’ makes it impossible to give a balanced view of seasons when you were playing. You have to cope with. and live in, the now. I thought that as soon as I retired I would get out a comfy chair and have a good old look at videos and DVDs of my career, but for a few years it didn’t feel right. By the time I got over that extreme ‘living for the now’ attitude, my career was so far in the past it felt almost sad to go and have a look back. So a decade and a half later I still haven’t sat back in that comfy chair. Maybe I never will and maybe that is healthy.

"It was a shock, but it was one of the shocks that drove the team to a new level of concentration."-

What it shows you is that footballers have to live in the moment and right now any talk about last season, last year or the last six months gets consigned to somewhere dark and dusty in the memory banks, to be considered (or maybe not) at a later date. Whatever the feelings have been lately, the team will be focusing on the very recent past and the very immediate future.

For the immediate past that means Crystal Palace and a display that showed almost every single one of the hallmarks of this Chelsea’s best performances. With maybe the exception of some Eden Hazard wizardry (another injury stopped that), this was the dominance and the style that we have witnessed time and again from this side, even if it hasn’t happened this season very often.

There was an utter belief in the passing and control as soon as the first goal had gone in and it just got more pronounced as the game progressed. Gone was the tentative over-deliberate passing of players struggling with their individual and group confidence issues. You can argue the whys and wherefores but the players will not, they will just get on with it now and simply try to keep it going.

Without being brilliant, that is now two defeats in the last 10 games. Those were 1-0 against Bournemouth and 2-1 against Leicester, neither of them hammerings as it were. So there is a platform to build on and most people seem to agree that Palace was another considerable step upwards.

No one is trying to paint an over-glossy picture, least of all me. A few weeks back I was warning of a relegation battle unless the results improved. That would be very unlikely if the belief continues at the current levels and we steer clear of injuries.

So while the players deal with one game at a time and all the other clichés/truisms, the management has to oversee the longer-term planning and that includes deciding who if anyone is brought in during the January transfer window. It is always hard anyway, but maybe doubly difficult when you have a manager appointed to the end of the season. If Guus Hiddink does move on, will what he wants for the squad still be wanted by the next man who comes in, assuming of course it isn’t Guus himself who decides to stay?

There is also the problem in knowing what is needed when you don’t know who is going to be injured or fit. Right now the centre-forward position is concerning with Loic Remy and Falcao both injured and even Eden struggling, but they could all be fine soon. It is a tough call and a complex one. I look forward to considering the incomers if there are any, but of course there are always the youngsters and the loan players that could be called up/back.

So while the management considers the short-, medium- and long-term, the rest can get their minds focused on Sunday and Sc**thorpe. It is impossible for fans not to think back fleetingly to Bradford last season, one of, if not the most extraordinary result of the year. It was a shock, but it was one of the shocks that drove the team to a new level of concentration, one that led us all the way to the title. This season, I suspect the team doesn’t need any more nasty surprises and neither do the fans. We have all had enough of them for a while thank you very much.

Ramires scores at home against Bradford in last year's FA Cup but all to no avail

I suppose this is exactly when it helps to be able to just live in the moment, shelve the past and blank what happened in the FA Cup last year. Other than maybe recalling just a little frisson of that embarrassment which could help spur the right type of attitude this time.

Last week was a tricky little quiz question. I asked if you could tell me who was the last player to score a winner for us at Selhurst Park against Crystal Palace, before the advent of the Premier League? Many thought it was actually me, but would I be as self-indulgent as to ask such a question with me as the answer? (Yes, ed!). Anyway it wasn’t, it was Kerry Dixon. The game was a Full Members Cup (known as the Zenith Data Systems Cup at the time) southern section semi-final in 1991.

It was a tricky one and only about 20 per cent of you got it right, so pat yourself on the back if you did. There can be only one winner however and this time my intelligent assistant (she has dropped the glamorous tag since she started studying medicine) has picked Shahveer Masood.

This week could you tell me what was Chelsea’s biggest post-1945 third round FA Cup win? The lucky winner chosen randomly from the correct answers will get a copy of the new Chelsea: The Complete Record book signed by one of the players. Answers as ever in the box below.

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With transfer deadline day tomorrow and as a man who has done such deals himself, former Blue Pat Nevin takes a look at this time of the year…

 

I usually don’t get too excited about the approach of transfer deadline day. More often than not the window can slam shut on the fingers of the person in charge of the Sky Sports ticker tape thingy as far as I am concerned.

Usually there is a desperation to make everything seem like the biggest story in the world has just broken, when in actual fact Rochdale have brought in a new left-back on loan. Even the Rochdale fans know it is not that big a deal, never mind the rest of us.

Yes there have been incredible last-moment signings that have ‘rocked‘ the football world. They are usually done in a blind panic and more often than not lead to much less impressive results than expected from the incoming player.

So why do these silly football clubs leave it to the last seconds anyway, when so much can go wrong with the deal when it is rushed? Why can’t they be sensible and just sign the player a week, or a month earlier? There are of course a few reasons.

The first is that a couple of big transfers have to go through to oil the wheels of the system. When one team lets a player go, they feel they have to replace him and they then have the funds, or more specifically, the space in the squad to do so. The trickle-down effect starts.

This is however only the second-most important reason for the mad rush in the dying embers of the window. The real driver is of course brinkmanship.

If you are at a smaller club, you might know perfectly well that you are going to sell the player to the bigger club eventually. You never know, another suitor might even appear in the meantime and you have a bidding war. That is the jackpot scenario. The most likely outcome is that by pretending you are not that keen, you might squeeze out an extra few million pounds or euros by taking it to the edge, especially if you know the buyer is desperate. 

I have done precisely the same myself and I can report it works perfectly.

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When I was chief executive at Motherwell in Scotland, I knew Manchester United needed a standby goalkeeper for their Champions League campaign. I just happened to have one, Andy Goram (pictured below), even if he was in the veteran stage of his career. With the help of a snowstorm, I managed to drag out the move into the last day of the window. I should mention here that it was the January window; even Scotland doesn’t get snowstorms in August…very often.

If push came to shove I would have given them Andy for free as we needed the wage bill trimmed but because of the brinkmanship on that last day, I pocketed the club £ ¼ million pounds extra. It is chicken feed these days of course, but it came in very handy in our then perilous state.

In short it isn’t generally the fault of the big buying clubs that transfers are done at the last moment and in a rush, it is the sellers squeezing from their side. Every businessman knows the deal in any transaction is done in the dying moments anyway, that is when the real hard-ball trading happens, however long the haggling has been going on.

All that aside, I will admit this time I am more interested in what might happen just before business closes. I look around the top sides and I see little gaps and weaknesses with most of them so they will, with Man City possibly an exception, be looking to add here and there. While City’s Joe Hart has been grabbing the English media’s collective attention, others have been badgering away, getting their work done out of the limelight. Most Chelsea fans know exactly where we need to bring in some cover and we wait in hope that this will be done, even if the price might not exactly match the value of the player at this late stage.

There is no right or wrong, the value of the market is mad and sometimes you are forced to pay over the odds. Arsene Wenger refused to play this high stakes roulette for years but even he has wilted this week. There is however a final caveat, there comes a point when the quality and the cost of the available players makes the deal not worth it when you consider what you already have available in your academy or on your own loan books.

Chelsea have this extra bargaining chip in the background more than anyone else. If a smaller club tries to be really silly in their demands, they know that a quick look at what we have on our books may make them think their hand is not as strong as they initially thought. Even when our loan players and kids are not quite ready yet, they are still helping the club in a very subtle way.

I might even keep the radio or the TV on in the background as the time draws near, but I have to say I think our team is in a pretty good place nonetheless. 

The Burnley performance was a joy to watch, with the confidence oozing throughout the team. The bench looked as strong as it has for a while, a very important point. 

The use of the bench by Antonio Conte has impressed everyone, rarely has the phrase impact player been more apposite as soon as any of our lads have taken to the field.

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The substitutes have produced in all three games so far, the linkup between all three subs at the weekend when Michy Batshuayi passed to Pedro who set up Victor Moses was almost over-egging the point!

In short, we are not very far away from having an extremely strong squad; hopefully it will be strong enough in quality, and more specifically in depth, over the coming days to show that we will be real challengers once again.

 

 

 

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