Ashley17

Cech; Bosingwa Cahill Terry Bertrand; Essien Romeu Malouda; Sturridge Torres Kalou.

8 changes for Chelsea...

Our Senegal lads aren't involved in this are they? http://www.coventryobserver.co.uk/2012/04/18/sport-Oman-face-Senegal-in-Olympic-qualifier-34474.html Hopefully the shock team news doesn't involve this.

To get back on topic, I'm starting to feel like this is actually a possibility. I know I should have been feeling like that for a while but with Arsenal playing Chelsea and then away to Stoke, I can see them getting roped back into the battle, which seemed improbable a few weeks ago.

Steven Taylor on late kick off.

Just to throw fuel on the fire, if Chelsea beat Arsenal in the Saturday lunch time kick off, 3rd is in our hands. Technically.

Obviously. Just wondered on what the general uptake used to be like. Uptake will probably be a fair bit higher now though seeing as it's been 5 years since our last foray. Not getting my hopes up. Might at least be able to get to a few home matches with Thursday being a regular day off work for me. Hopefully the home games aren't ruined by stupid kick offs for TV. City for example have kicked off at 5/6pm on a couple of occasions, in home games no less. The away games could be at any bloody time, remember the 4pm against Valarenga?

Bloody hell, didn't realise our game away at Chelsea is 3 days before the FA Cup final. They're going to have played 6 games between us beating Bolton and facing them - we'll have played 2.

From that picture, I don't know how Terry could possibly tell.

For what, denying a goalscoring opportunity when a goal has been scored?

So that's 2 offside goals, a random penalty and a goal that didn't cross the line. And Cech avoids a red card a ban..

Drog-bar.

Great composure

I'd like Chelsea and Liverpool in the final. Liverpool because it means we have European football basically guaranteed by 3pm tomorrow, and the pressure is off for us. Chelsea because it means more games for them and puts more doubt in Tottenham minds, who are starting to feel the pressure a bit. All boiling up nicely

If it was 4-3-3 neither Ba nor Cisse were on the left side of that front 3. Jonas was definitely the most left sided in the first half, then it was basic 4-4-2 second half as you described.

Why are there no pictures of the group hug after the 2nd goal? Starting to think I imagined it. Very much so, seemed to me that Pardew decided that it wasn't possible to play through Bolton's 3 man centre midfield with the players we had on the pitch so decided to give us a bit more width and energy. Don't think Perch did an awful lot wrong but Cabaye was sitting in front of the back 4 to try and get on the ball and it made Perch a bit redundant.

If I were clever enough to make a mackem logic meme, it would say: "Off to Goodison Park to get revenge for cup loss" "Lose 4-0."

Delight to watch Efficient is probably the best way to describe us

Lindegaard has kept 6 clean sheets according to the Fantasy Premier League website.

Poor game but Ben Arfa's goal made it all worthwhile. Tough call on which was better, think the Blackburn cup goal shades it for me as it seemed to go on forever, but this was more important and a fucking frightening turn of speed. We've all seen players be quick over 100 yards without the ball but this kid with the ball, shit me he is rapid. Ironically he had probably his poorest opening 45 for us but fair play to Pards for leaving him on when a couple of months ago he'd have been hooked. Nobody played particularly badly, just as a team we lacked a bit of cohesion. Ferguson helped a lot, his fresh legs and natural width was just what we needed. Their midfield 3 stifled Cabaye, which was a shame.

Think this mighty be a scrappy, dour affair. Two teams who will be tired and the better of the two sides potentially missing their two standout centre midfielders. 0-0 or an odd goal win. Whenever we're a heavy favourites at home it never seems to work out that way, particularly recently. Norwich & Wolves being two good examples.

"Your's"

Are you for real? Villa put too much trust in O'Neill. O'Neill's idea of a transfer policy is that you have no scouting network (genuinely, that's not an exaggeration, we didn't have any), and that you buy only from the home market. He bought 30 odd players at Villa. The number who weren't playing already in the UK? Two. And one of those only happened because Lyon got on the blower and offered him to us. MON will only work somewhere where he's the undisputed power - on and off the pitch. That's why Quinn has been shunted away. At Villa, MON worked with three chief executives - Richard FitzGerald, Michael Cunnah and Paul Faulkner. The first two left because they found MON impossible to work with. the final one was the one who told him he had to do something about the wage bill. He refused, hoping he'd win again, only not to, as he was up against one of Lerner's closest advisors. So what did he do? He threw his toys out of the pram and left, *five days* before the start of the season. That screwed up last season for us, and if you want an indicator of where his fucking shameful transfer policy left us, look at the logic in buying an enitre defence in 2008-09 (Friedel. Shorey. Curtis Davies, Cuellar, Luke Young - who he could have had for 2m the year before, but waited and paid 5m for) then, deciding he didn't rate them almost immediately, going out the next season and buying ANOTHER entire defence (Beye, Warnock, Collins, Dunne). You can point at Ashley Young and say he was a good signing (he was), and Milner was superb for us, but as he'd already spent a year with us before, that one was hardly earth shattering in terms of him scouting out a gem. When he left, he left us with a wage bill that was 88% of our turnover, and at that point I think we had the sixth or seventh highest turnover in the league - so go figure that one out. That's why we've had Habib Beye here for three whole years, now aged 35, picking up 40k a week. Thats why we bought Curtis Davies for 10 million pounds - think about it, ten million pounds - only to see him fail and be moved on to Blues for a pittance. That's also why we're paying Emile Fucking Heskey 65,000 a week until he's 35, too. You can kid yourself about "oh, it'l be different this time" but it will not be. When he left Celtic, they had the same problems. They were paying Bobo Balde the best part of 40k a week. In the SPL. Think about it. I note also that you're needing to buy strikers this summer. Well, good luck for that. I remember us clamouring for a reliable scorer to get us into the top four. Martin went out and bought Harewood, then Heskey. At the time Darren Bent went to Sunderland for a measley £10m. He'll almost certainly sign Kevin Doyle for you, and you'll have misgivings and convince yourself it's about what he does in a Sunderland shirt that matters, but good fucking luck with that, because O'Neill couldn't pick a striker to save his life. Don't get me wrong, MON had us finishing sixth (as, however, did O'Leary, which puts it in context), he's not a bad manager at all. But I'll tell you this for nothing, he'll never get you finishing about 8th or so (which these days is the new sixth, as it's harder up the top than it used to be), for two reasons. Those reasons are that to make that extra jump, you need two things - you need to play the transfer market effectively, and you need to be tactically sound. Those, by coincidence, are MON's two major weaknesses. I've already covered transfers, but about now you should be getting the general sense that although it's ace when his Plan A works (soak up pressure, counter attack, like an away team), he genuinely does not have a clue about where to start iwth having a Plan B. In four years with us, I also genuinely can not remember one single instance when he made a substitution which changed a match, or changed the way we were set out to play. I suspect he's probably not changed much. I bet, for example, if i look at your last fixture, he'll have made a change at around 75 minutes. I bet he's done that in almost all your games. Over the course of time, it'll be one player more than any he brings on (for us it was Sidwell, another execrable waste of money). For you, no idea who it'l be, but it'll happen, believe me. This is one of my favourite posts ever. Well done sir.

Massive yes for me. As long as we don't get an horrific group with thousands of miles of travelling (the group Stoke got was ridiculous) it's a good chance to get some squad players more game time as well as welcoming some big teams to SJP - for all you'll have to play some guff there's bound to be some decent teams along the way. It's also a chance to get some momentum going, especialyl as the start of the season if you get an easy-ish qualifier. Prime example of that was 01/02 when we got off to a flying start as we played about 6 Inter-toto games, and even though we didn't qualify, we would sharper than a lot of teams early in the season.

Le Tissier