On the plus side this loss shows that the team needs massive upgrades , if we had won the board might have felt like we have good defenders and only need a few players. It is obvious that we need a massive overhaul. Hopefully Rudiger and Christensen are sold. The former has rocks for brains and the latter is just too soft for the premier league.

Thought game was for the taking today. Unfortunately James and Alonso were poor and offered nothing offensively and  Jorginho far too negative forcing Kovacic to come too deep to pick up the ball. 

Jorginho is a liability and all he does is perpetuate passing amongst the back line and rarely starts an offensive phase of play....

Clear to all however and I suspect/hope we won't see.much of him next season.

 

3 hours ago, EdinburghBlue said:

Before anyone says we’re being bitter or it’s not a conspiracy - can we just remember in the 2017 final when Sanchez played volleyball to stop a clearance and score. Which the linesman disallowed but Taylor overruled and allowed the goal? Funnily enough we lost that 2-1 with 10 men as well. He’s a cheating c**t and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Just gonna leave this here as well....

Alonso and Reece went missing all match. Reece James seems really passive at the moment.

Can't believe the season Rudiger has had. Shocking.

Defo need some new defenders.

27 minutes ago, charierre said:

The problem with VAR , it's basically pick a frame that suits the argument. The most inconsistent part of the full argument was that BBC failed to provide an in game replay, why?  Noticeable too the VAR official was the one Alonso conned the free kick out of last week v Wolves.

 

40 minutes ago, Sexyfootball said:

Seem to be two stills of the "handball" doing the rounds ... which is correct ?

If you look at Abrahams position, the lower picture is slightly after the first as Tammy has started to turn left. 

I couldn't believe to Beeb didn't replay the incident.

Yes if both shots are from the same camera and sequence of film then the lower shot clearly negates the upper shot. The only question would be if the keeper still had his hands on the ball.

Can't understand why we didn't get a VAR review that was shown on screen. 

The game probably got away from us the moment Pulisic went off. We've been totally reliant on him since the restart. The ref played his part though. 

After we scored the goal we stopped playing and Arsenal were tossing balls over our defence like throwing grenades, the result was inevitable and Frank never reacted.  All day James was playing backward passes even from the half way line, as was most of the back line. Jorghino as expected offered nothing leaving Kovacic to try and work midfield on his own, with some intermittent assistance from Mount.  Disappointing day overall but we've seen this too many times when Frank plays a team that have won 2 games in a row and keeps the same formation they generally have tanked the following game.   Onwards and upwards...let's hope we can make better headway next season...

Watched Lamp's post match press conference. It is clear that Frank identified Aubo and long balls on the right as a major threat, but our players could not address it.  Is it Franks's fault for not hammering this message into peoples sculls or is it players fault for poor positioning, brain farts and poor physical form? 

One thing I did not like in Lamp's pressi is how Frank admitted that he was shouting at the players from the side trying to bring some urgency into their play, but it was to no avail.  Frank, being the boss does not equal to being mates, as familiarity breads contempt.  I want to see arses seriously kicked - it is good for the players in the long run and is good for the fans.

3 hours ago, abramovich said:

If we had better and much faster backline, we'd be able to live with that playing tactic. Unfortunately, our defence is both slow and incompetent.

See I don't think it is. Zouma and Rudiger are two of the fastest defenders in the Premier League. When you play a high line you have to pressure the ball or else you will always get caught out by quick players regardless. We were strolling around not pressuring the ball. We could have conceded three goals from exactly the same sort of situation. 

As some others said the real insanity of the day is why we were playing with such a high line when up 1-0 in a cup final. Their whole game was built around long balls to Aubameyang. Maybe, we might have wanted to drop off ten yards to negate that? Our game management and lack of pragmatism is shocking sometimes.

3 hours ago, Jangz said:

to think .. it all started when Kova had the ball .. Jorgi was beside him .. and couldnt find a runner.. panicked tried to take on 2-3 players.. overran the ball and lunged in.. i think that was the moment it turned for us..

Hadn't thought about this but it's a fair point. That happened shortly before drinks where Arteta changed his tactics too. After that point our midfield connection was zero. How many times did we get to midfield to find we had no options and then pass backwards to have 30 more passes between the back three?

2 hours ago, ddrblue said:

We can’t blame the ref for how bad cfc played  we looked shocking in the last 35 mins of the first half we pass back to our back line all 

the time . Two forced injury’s type of tied franks hands on his substitutions ,but we came out in the 2nd half looking exactly the same as the first half ,or arsenal stepped of the gas a little .

chelseas season > beat wolves a step forward > next game a step backwards due to our first half performance today 

This is going to be how it is for a while I suspect. Young players and a learning manager. Arteta tactically was excellent and shut us down and bar ten minutes at the start of the second half where James came inside and just about played in midfield to give us some control we were outplayed. Now a 14-2 foul count and all the rest didn't help but we weren't at the races.

I thought today we missed Willian enormously. He is guy who midfielders can pass to under pressure back to goal and he can hold it and win a foul. Neither Mount or Pulisic have that in their locker. 

What i dont get for the second goal is, Christensen makes a great tackle and Bellerin clears him out. Why has the ***** taylor blown up, and why havent var looked at it. Christensen was down on the ground after it aswell, and not a word was mentioned

15 minutes ago, Stas1 said:

Watched Lamp's post match press conference. It is clear that Frank identified Aubo and long balls on the right as a major threat, but our players could not address it.  Is it Franks's fault for not hammering this message into peoples sculls or is it players fault for poor positioning, brain farts and poor physical form? 

One thing I did not like in Lamp's pressi is how Frank admitted that he was shouting at the players from the side trying to bring some urgency into their play, but it was to no avail.  Frank, being the boss does not equal to being mates, as familiarity breads contempt.  I want to see arses seriously kicked - it is good for the players in the long run and is good for the fans.

One thing to identify it. Another to address it. The implication that his job is just to yell and encourage his players from the sideline suggests the greatest challenge for his management career. It's the Redknapp style laissez-faire approach where he doesn't make changes in approach and leaves it to the players or makes those changes too late. 

If you identify that as a problem, why not tell the team to drop off 10 metres and close that gap at 1-0 up? Similarly we had lost complete control of midfield by the time Dave came off, the obvious thing was to go 4-3-3 to get a handle on that but instead we went like for like and never won the midfield back for the rest of the game.

Now I understand it's easy being Sunday morning manager and there is no doubt he is the best man manager we've had here since Carlo, but his tactical approach to the game is missing in action sometimes at the moment. That is the big thing for him to work on over the off season. 

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Spiller86

Well what a load of bollox. We have somehow contrived to lose to a bang average arsenal side in the cup final again. 
I was pleased Lampard didn’t go too much down the ref was sh*t line and injuries too. Instead he had a go at the way they stopped playing about 15 minutes in and he was right. We let them off the hook.

I’m going to contradict myself though by saying aubameyang did the pro thing of staying on his feet long enough till he got in the area before flopping to the floor, something arsenal players did all Day. Haven’t seen a team flop and moan to the ref as much as that for a while. Every challenge. But then if the ref is so sh*t to give you everything, why not?

thought we actually did quite well in the second half - Arse restricted to a few counter attacks but that was enough. Once Pulisic went off, we had no scary threat. 
Lastly, what kind of message has Hudson-Odoi been sent that Lampard would rather bring on an ageing Pedro who is about to leave rather than him? All is not well there me thinks 
 

Sucks to lose and especially to them in a final, but I for one not losing any sleep over it. The congestion of matches have taken tolls on the team, the defence is not fixing itself in a week, better striker needed on the day ( and we have one ready in months time), and few things went against us on the day and that's how it is. At the end of the day, any team would trade a CL spot for the FA cup, as much as we love and respect the tradition. The team and Lampard has reached their objective, FA cup would be the icing on the cake, but we should be contend with the cake given the kind of sh1t we were in at the start of the season.

we really missed Willian on that right side. Hopefully he signs the contract

Respectfully disagree on that. FA cup over forth for me.

2 hours ago, Oli said:

What i dont get for the second goal is, Christensen makes a great tackle and Bellerin clears him out. Why has the ***** taylor blown up, and why havent var looked at it. Christensen was down on the ground after it aswell, and not a word was mentioned

In Taylor's mind it's allowing the game to continue because he only sees Christensen making a foul there so it's advantage being played and nothing else.

6 hours ago, Oli said:

What i dont get for the second goal is, Christensen makes a great tackle and Bellerin clears him out. Why has the ***** taylor blown up, and why havent var looked at it. Christensen was down on the ground after it aswell, and not a word was mentioned

Good point.

In the cold light of day a few thoughts.

Despite being nervous all week I was confident we were going to win yesterday. When we scored I didn't think anything else.

Dave going off with his hamstring injury was massive as to me it unbalanced the defence.  Second ha

f we started brightly and I thought we were going to score. Their second was very poor from our defensive point.

Pulisic going off with his hamstring injury was a major factor for us.

The sending off was unbelievable.

 

Two hamstring injuries,a joke sending off and an inept twat of a referee didn't help,I don't like losing to long ball Arsenal one bit,we were naive today.Looking forward to next season already.....UP THE CHELS ¡

There are some positives to losing - 

Tottenham will have to win three qualifying rounds to even enter next season's Europa League group stages - trips to Azerbaijan on the horizon!

No thanks...

5 hours ago, The Don Antonio said:

we really missed Willian on that right side. Hopefully he signs the contract

No thanks...

Apologies if this has already been mentioned. Ian Wright was a BBC pundit yesterday who was apparently shouting stuff across the pitch like “man on” “look behind you” and “man unmarked”. After the game an Arsenal player said he could hear all his instructions. WTF he’s being paid by a public service to comment on the game.

 

Can that be right?

1 hour ago, JM7 said:

There are some positives to losing - 

Tottenham will have to win three qualifying rounds to even enter next season's Europa League group stages - trips to Azerbaijan on the horizon!

Plus we don't have to play for the Charity Shield, for which we have developed a losing streak 

In a perverse sort of way I'm glad we didn't equalise extra time with nine men it could easily have ended up 4-2, 5-2.

Edited August 2, 20205 yr by bluehaze