Novocastrian

If we are just going to constantly lump it forward can we bring Shola on?

I'm having flashbacks to Allardyce here, hoof, hoof and hoof again.

£10 tickets apparently to get it to near capacity. It's almost as though some common sense has been used. It'll never catch on!

This. Even Championship teams are dong it! Wolves put out a second string and got battered by Chelsea with Torres, Mata et al!! A bit of ambition please, we can rest the big players when we really do have a fixture pile up a the end of the season. The way we are waving the white flag in the cups it's unlikely that will happen. The youngsters will get more benefit by being eased in alongside the first teamers in ones and twos, not mobbed up as a group with two or three first teamers alongside them.

I agree, but if they finish outside the automatic qualifying positions in their own country they should start at the first qualifying round. That seems fair to me and wouldn't be too difficult to organise. I also think the Europa League Champ should get a place, anything to inject a bit more life into that competition would be welcome.

Drogba is probably the single most important reason for Chelsea's success over the past few years. He is obviously not as effective as he was a couple of seasons ago but his strength, aerial power, shooting, skill and work rate meant he could be play alone up front. He didn't need a strike partner but could still terrorise defences on his own tying up both centre halves. This allowed Mourinho to deploy an extra defensive midfielder, free'd Lampard up to maraud on the edge of the opposition's box and the rest is history. I do think he is cheating more now his powers seem to be on the wane but that might just be me.

Was he taken off injured or did he make a miraculous recovery and play the whole game? Bert Trautmann played in an FA Cup Final with a broken neck.....modern football I suppose. Oh my god, he gave him a Chinese Burn! Is Puyol a man or a mouse? He'd just had his wrist stood on or something, had it strapped up shortly after.

Oh my god, he gave him a Chinese Burn! Is Puyol a man or a mouse?

Exactly, Bayern will pump them in the final so who cares, great watching Barca get put out and Chelsea will be in the Europa next season, win-win if you ask me!

That's not true at all like like. Both Ba and Cisse play best in a more advanced poacher role imo. Which is why I'm somewhat worried about their partnership. Playing Ba in a support role doesn't just diminish his attacking threat, it often results in our forward line getting detached from our ultra deep midfield. Imo the way forward is to scrap our ineffective wing play. We don't need to play each game with four full backs. Give Hatem the free role upfront and move Jonas infield. Pardew's philosophy is rigid to the maximum though and such a formation requires a lot of fluidity in passing and movement, so it's fair to say that's never going to happen No way Ba is a 'number 9' lead the line type player. He is better dropping off and foraging in the final third. Just because he has a knack of getting into the box on the end of crosses, deflections, rebounds etc doesn't make him a poachers, it's more to do with timing and an eye for goal. He'll be much better with someone slightly ahead of him occupying one or two of the centre backs while he probes and makes runs.

Never been his biggest fan (has anybody?) but just recently he looks fit, strong and confident. I'm not suggesting he displaces any of our other strikers (at least not the ones that actually score goals) but credit where credit is due.

Exactly! Like Ginola losing the ball at the corner flag, nothing to do with the other ten players who didn't stop the goal.

Simpson cleared one off the line 5 mins before, doesn't deserve this stick.

The worst pair of backup goalkeepers in living memory.

We are missing Steven Taylor far more than Ryan Taylor. Raylor is a solid utility man who can put a shift in, in numerous positions. He isn't even the best player we have in any of those positions, bit of a strange comment from Pardew. Sounds like he was just trying to play the old 'we are missing player X,Y,Z' to cover his arse from the shambolic defensive display.

Who said that?

Messi is the greatest player to grace the game since football was 'invented' after the World Cup in 1990. I never saw Pele but for me Maradona is still the greatest. Messi is fabulously talented but he has been playing organised football at Barcelona since he was knee high to a grasshopper. Maradona was more instinctive and inventive, real poetry in motion. Just my own thoughts.

Marveaux was fit enough to play a full game in the cup, plus extra time. What else does he have to do to prove he can play? He was on a 'free' and he was available so he was bought. Unfortunately I think he was bought without much thought about how he is going to be deployed. I'm not convinced Pardew knows what to do with him.

wow jones at center and tiote at wing? we'll probably lose 5-0 then That's tonight's 'line up' from today's Daily Telegraph

Lovenkrands Best Obertan Cabaye Jonas Tiote R. Taylor S. Taylor Colo Simpson Krul

That is half right. He also paid 140m in CASH to Shepherd and the Halls for the club, so even if his initial loan is paid back through profits that the club makes, there is still the initial capital cost of 140m. I think his total investment in the club is around 280m. If he makes a 40m profit for the past year and uses that to reduce the debt, then his net investment in the club will still be north of 200m, which means that if he sells for anything less than that, he'll have made a loss. And for what it's worth, when you invest almost 300m in anything, you expect returns every year. He's obviously not had any return on his investment over the past 4 years, so there is an opportunity cost to factor into it. A rough estimate of his investment so far is probably around 350m (without taking into account last year's profits). Does he have to disclose any of this? Is it possible to join the dots from the published accounts and find out exactly how the club was bought and who is owed the money? Sorry for sounding like an idiot I just want to understand where the club is financially. Yeah, you'll be able to see everything from the yearly accounts published. When he repays a bit of the debt back this year, it'll show up in the accounts as a smaller gross debt (which is what I expect to see). Our cashflow is probably not good yet because we're paying out transfers up front and selling in installments, but from a financial perspective, things are improving and the medium term future looks good (low wages, high revenue = profits). Maybe the cash-flow situation will actually look good because we got all the Carroll money up front. If that's the case then our overdraft will be significantly lower than the 36m that it was in the last set of accounts. The trouble is maintaining lower wages which is impossible to do for good players, so you either have to sell them and replace them with players whose wages are lower, or pay them more which will reduce the profit. I'm just giving you an objective look on the finances, by the way. It's obviously no fun as a fan to see negative net spending every window and us having to suffer through watching s**** like Ameobi and Lovenkrands when we should realistically be watching the likes of Gameiro and Ruiz. This is the Ashley blueprint.

We have already got a number of pretty average strikers and a couple of raw prospects. We needed a proper Number 9 to hang our hat on. It needn't have cost £20m but the type of player we needed to replace Carrol was going to cost a fair bit, maybe up to £15m. We seemed to have a very narrow shortlist of players, mainly based around Ligue 1, what about players plying their trade in other European leagues? South America? Once our supposed preferred options were unavailable we needed to cast the net wider instead of working down the list until we got to Maiga and Roux. In the end Ashley didn't want to spend the money and another opportunity to move forward and break into the top 6-8 goes begging. As for Pardew, if he had any integrity he would resign.

I strongly hope you're right. Don't know if he's any good like. Auclair on Talksport reckons he's 'not really top drawer'. A bit of a risk but that's the situation these bungling cunts have put us in.

It's not so much that I don't rate him. I think he's a talented youngster, a bit unproven at this level mind. I just don't see the point in improving a player from another team in the league. People will complain that we didn't play him enough (Rossi), or he'll just f*** off back to Man U at the end of the season and look decent for them (Welbeck). We really should have had our own striker in a long time ago. It's likely that Macheda will just take the place of Sammy or Vuckic on the bench and hinder their development. At least with Sturridge you know you'll get goals and he'd start every week, and if we got PVA we'd have a chance of signing him at the end of the loan. Probably the only two loan deals I'd be keen on. Good post, Macheda is a good player but this makes no sense to us in the long term. All those thinking Macheda is coming in with Maiga/Roux: dream on. If Macheda comes in then he is the new striker.

There's two types of 'right footed' though. 1. Predominately right footed and, 2. Left foot just for standing. I believe he falls into the former camp.