Chelsea Thread

PIPA23 said:
guys you can´t expect an owner like Abramovich to intervene with the team that much...

he will never be sattisfied, he hit the spot with Mourinho at first time, now he thinks that all coaches can get instant success after no preparation or only one pre-season... this is sick... i could not support a club where the coach basicly is the owner himself...

a crazy owner to add...

once a manager is appointed, he should manage things, owner should say OK or NO.. nothing else.
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It's worked out pretty well with Berlusconi though. Moratti is like Roman.

Roman sacked Ancelotti after winning the Prem convincingly... I thought he could've built a super team but they didn't give him much time.
 
I wonder who will come after him...
Abramovich clearly doesn't have a clue. I think sacking AVB is extremely unfair. He never had a chance with this squad of aging players.
 
Who will be the next manager of Chelsea? Is it going to be Mourinho, Benitez or Guardiola?
 
I think this 'ageing' stuff is bollocks. Chelsea's starting lineup has a few players over 30, usually Terry, Lampard, Drogba and Cole, all of which are capable of playing at the top level. Other than that, there are players like Ramires, Luiz, Bosingwa, Sturridge, Mata etc. that are still at their peak playing ages.

imo AVB tries to play the Mourinho role but is just seen as a man with boots too big to fill, especially by players with strong personalities like Drogba. I think he had a lot of chances, but it's hard trying to bring in a game plan and act as leader when you used to be an assistant to Mourinho and trying to mimic a similar style that's been done before.
 
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I feel a bit sorry for Villas-Boas. Chelsea knew what they were getting - a promising and relatively inexperienced coach with a different approach - and they knew they have a team in transition and in need of change. AVB needed time and support to impart his ideas and make those changes. Instead, player power tears its ugly head and Abramovich backs the bad eggs in the dressing room rather than the manager.

Chelsea are a joke and a terrible football club. Terry, Drogba, Lampard et al should be ashamed.
 
Exactly, I don't see were they go from here? AVB needed until this Summer but the players who knew their time was coming to an end made sure that didn't happen.

Honestly You might as well make Terry player manager and Frank his assistant.
 
Milanista said:
I think he had a lot of chances, but it's hard trying to bring in a game plan and act as leader when you used to be an assistant to Mourinho and trying to mimic a similar style that's been done before.
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You're so wrong my friend. They are totally different. AVB has his own personal approach, his own style, his own philosophy. This might have been the problem, people thought AVB was Mourinho 2.0 when in fact he is just André Villas Boas.
 
Oh dear. Just watched the story on Sky Sports News and they do the obligatory 'talk to fans outside the ground' thing. The 'fans' they speak to - 50% wearing flat caps - conform to my stereotype of Chelsea fans as being complete fucking morons.

"You have to hit the ground running at this club and win trophies" - I take it this chap didn't follow Chelsea pre-Abramovich, especially during the eighties and early nineties?

"The players didn't respect him and didn't want to play for him". Yawn. :YAWN:

The_Special_One said:
You're so wrong my friend. They are totally different. AVB has his own personal approach, his own style, his own philosophy. This might have been the problem, people thought AVB was Mourinho 2.0 when in fact he is just André Villas Boas.
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Agreed. Chelsea were deluded if they thought anything else.
 
Yes Stef, i also think you are completely wrong.
From what i've seen of AVB, he is tactically more astute. Mourinho is the great motivator, but it seems that clubs don't fare well if he leaves...
Players liker Terry, Lampard are past their prime...
 
For me, it's not about Lampard, Terry etc. being too old, it's the fact they've seen 5-6 managers come and go since Mourinho, think about what that has done to their mentality, if they don't like a manager and decide they're not going to play for him, they know that manager will be gone quicker than they can say "Roman, we have a problem...".

AVB had it right, when he tried to start fresh, but he needed more time. Though he had lost the plot with some of his comments to the press lately, but I guess you can understand that when he hasn't got any backing from within the club whatsoever.
 
AVB stirred the pot too much. Chels had a good squad capable of being 2nd/3rd spot. He really should of tweak a bit slowly not shake the whole tree leaving f`all fruits on the ground. Shame another boss bites the dust :COAT:

Mourinho coming back might not be the same City is here now!
 
I agree with Bebo. For all those saying that Chelsea have some players past it - you can't ignore the teams they've LOST against. West Brom, QPR, Villa, Everton - it's one thing to lose to United or even Liverpool, but when you're dropping points every other week against teams that are FAR less talented it has to be the manager's fault.

In much the same way that we say Moyes overachieves, or Hodgson does with the players at their disposal, I feel that AVB was underachieving with what he had.

I wonder if Mourinho will come back next season. Abramovich would have to pay him a sh*t ton of money but let's be honest, that wouldn't be anything new. Is Ancelotti employed at the moment? Hiddink?
 
But where do you draw the line on who's fault it is? Players don't seem to hold any responsibility for the teams downfall. I'm not saying AVB was great or anything, it's just hard to heap everything on him. I can imagine the players being down a bit because they've gone through managers like a cheap whore through johns.
But when do their poor performances get them some blame? Aside from Torres who has been called out?
 
I guess the point is that a good manager will make his players perform. If the dressing room was down, or the was discord, that in the end falls at the feet of the manager.

So you can argue that the players haven't been pulling their weight, but if not the manager who should be making them do that?
 
Well you can't deny that AVB made some mistakes, everybody does.
But IMO he was treated unfair. Chelsea bought at least three players without consulting him (Romelu Lukaku, Thibaut Courtois and Kevin De Bruyne, and i know this because they said so themselves in Belgian papers and on television). Those 3 players are talented, but if you really want to renew your team in short term, you don't need this sort of very inexperienced an immature (apart from Courtois, who is already better than Cech IMO) player. With the money they spend on Lukaku and De Bruyne, they could have bought other players who could play a role in short term.
Chelsea desperately need to sell some older player and buy some younger and this because of the financial fair-play rules.
AVB never had the chance to build. Apart from that, it is very well known that Chelsea has an extremely difficult dressing room and it seems to AVB never got the support he deserves. I don't know if he really is a top class manager, but he never had a fair chance to prove himself while being at Chelsea.

I also don't agree with the fact that if a team looses from teams like WBA and other lesser teams, that the manager is to blame. It seems very clear to me, that in that case the players are to blame. I would rather blame AVB for Man Utd's come back. But not for loosing against obviously weaker teams...Good players in good form and with the right frame of mind don't need coaches against weaker sides.

The problem is that Abramovich after Mourinho has created continuous uncertainty for both players and staff. Chelsea isn't a club that is well led. And things started to decline very fast after the sacking of Ray Wilkins, that was something very weird with lots of speculation. After that Chelsea never was the same team.
 
beachryan said:
I guess the point is that a good manager will make his players perform. If the dressing room was down, or the was discord, that in the end falls at the feet of the manager.

So you can argue that the players haven't been pulling their weight, but if not the manager who should be making them do that?
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the owner, wich is the real "boss" in a club.
what' ure saying ryan is absolutely correct. most of the times, the coach is responsible for his players motivations and performances.... but not always (and i believe this is one of those exceptions).

the relationship between a coach and his players is quite a weird one. in almost every other working environment the dynamics are different. u follow your "boss" because he's your employer (the one who actually pays u) or because he occupies a higher place in the power structure (that how it works in the army or in most companies).

but in football clubs hierarchies are much less definite. the coach is an employee, just like any other player.... quite often he's payed even less than most players (wich carries a lot of weight in the players' minds), sometimes he's got less experience than his players and in some rare circumstances, he's even younger than some players.
the coach has to charm his players, he must "conquer" them though his charisma and authority.... and those factors i just mentioned play a big role in this process, making it easier (or much harder) for the coach to win his players over and having them "playing for him".

when some players do not respect the coach, start to question him, or, even worse, start delivering poor performances because they don't have faith in him, it's up to the onwer (the real boss) to step up and bestow some of his own authority upon the coach (by setting the players straight).

milan offers quite a fitting anecdote. milano, 1987: sacchi just joined milan a few months back. arrigo is a young promising coach, who is having his first chance at a top club and that's only his second experience in major football (he's just coming from his first gig in serie a, a glorious 2 years experience in parma).
milan is a top club filled with big stars, while sacchi is by all means a "newbie". as if that wasn't enough, he's treating those top players as if they were a bunch of kids, pretending to "teach them how to play football" and forcing them to endure very stressing training sessions and endless tactical sessions (so they could absorb his "new crazy ideas").
after a few weeks the players stopped following him, they didn't trust him, they didn't like his new stressing methods, and, since he was just a newbie, they thought they could push berlusconi to sack him by showing their distrust on the coach with some poor performances on the pitch.
berlusconi got the message, but his reaction was not what the players expected. one day, just before a serie a match versus Verona, berlusconi waited the players just outside the dressing room. as the players were coming out of the dressing room to reach the pitch, he stopped each one of them on the dressing room's door, and told each one of them the very same phrase: "arrigo sacchi is milan's coach and he's not going anywhere, so deal with it. i just renewed his contract for 3 more years and if i'll have to kick someone out of this club because of your poor performances, believe me, that someone won't be him".
he repeated this very same phrase to each player. the players got the message; they won that tricky game in verona and that match turned out to be milan's (and sacchi's) turning point. according to berlusconi and arrigo himself, that's when sacchi's legend was born.
 
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beachryan said:
I guess the point is that a good manager will make his players perform. If the dressing room was down, or the was discord, that in the end falls at the feet of the manager.

So you can argue that the players haven't been pulling their weight, but if not the manager who should be making them do that?
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Well it's all down to how much backing the managers get from the owners. Pretty much like lo zio illustrated there with Milan in the 80's.

You have to appreciate just how difficult it is to deal with Chelsea's senior players, with their influence inside the club and their ridiculously high wages.
Today's wages are ridiculously inflated if we compare it to the 80's, making it all the more difficult.

If players are undermining you as a manager what do you do? I think the obvious reaction is to bench them. But how do you do that with the likes of Terry, Lampard, Drogba? The owner will look at their combined wage bill and tell the manager "look, it's a lot of investment there, you have to make it work with these guys in the team, it's your problem now"
Not to mention that some of these players might be close friends with Abramovich.

I just don't know how you control a mutiny like that at Chelsea.

You're a united fan beachryan, so tell me, can you imagine this situation ever escalating to this level at Man Utd? Ferguson wouldn't even let it get to this point. How many boots would be flying in that dressing room? :LOL:
The key is continuity and backing from the board. Chelsea offers none to their managers.

If Villas Boas had the chance to overhaul some things during the summer, then we would have seen what he could really do.
 
Great story about Berlusconi Ben....
AVB needed Abramovich 's support and didn't get it...it will make matters worse and more difficult for a new manager...
 
Exactly.

The owner never publicly backed him and that was a HUGE problem and their downfall.

AVB certainly made some mistakes this season but I think it would've been next year and the year after where we would've seen his magic. This was always gonna be a huge transitional year. Unfortunately, he wasn't left alone and supported properly to accomplish the task he was hired for doing.

And you guys remember how much Roman paid to get this guy out of his newly signed contract at Porto?!!? Crazy! And then gave him a HUGE contract himself of course!

One thing's for sure, Chelsea failure or not, AVB is freaking loaded! lol Super Rich guy now and still so young! :D
 
Mehtab said:
Roman Abramovic should be a manager himself.
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always has been ! the problem is the manager assigned is the # 2 ;)

Moyes being boss would be nice! to actually work w/ £££ at his disposal and he`ll make more in in wages than he has in the last 5 years and that`s after Roman sacks him .
 
I'd like to see Moyes get a job at a club that can give him funds and potentially win trophies. I love Everton as a football club and Moyes has done a terrific job there, but he is limited as to what he can achieve given their financial constraints.

Chelsea appointing Moyes would seem far too sensible on the face of it. I expect them to go for a high profile European coach again. But Moyes would certainly sort out the dressing room at Stamford Bridge. Would you upset him?
 
Well I don't think he'd have any problems facing up to the players, he'd scare the hell out of me.
 
Yeah Moyes would be awesome and it's about time he got his chance at a more ambitious club with actual resources to spend a bit.

But is Abramovich that sensible? I doubt it.
 
You know, I just remembered. This is exactly like the Raiders, they have a really good group of players, but the (now deceased) owner constantly undermined the 800 coaches he had brought in through the years.

Abramovic is far too impatient to actually let any manager build something. He's gonna spend money to get a big name, then spend more for a few new players as well.
 
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