wow

Chelsea have no chance at top 4 so those odds are pretty weird.

Not sure how much to read into this victory over Pool, after all, lads its pool.

Dont have anything objective to base it on, but my instincts tell me we will definately gain momentum from this win and kick on from here to mount a challenge on all remaining title and cup fronts.

Pretty certain of it.

Awful start, can barely complete a sideways pass and doing our level best to gift them a goal.

Don't worry, we can always pass backwards.

we have started this match dreadfully

a nice Chelsea-like performance from Mun would be great

https://twitter.com/Beanyman62

beanyman on twitter, well worth a follow for interviews

Gray!

Jose is on the pitch lol

Jose is still standing on the pitch with his coaching staff on BT sports lol

Why I wouldn't can Jose:

(1) Do you really want to cut ties with a manager (this time almost surely for good) who has been twice proven to be capable of winning titles/trophies at your club, after a bad third of a season with an aging squad on a title hangover, which was shabbily bolstered with fresh blood over the summer, just so you can chase down 4th place?

Personally I would keep Mourinho even if I knew that doing so would definitively cost me a CL bid for next year.

(2) Who are you replacing him with?

There aren't very many elite managers in the game. That's why we LFC supporters were so pleasantly surprised to land Klopp. There simply aren't enough to go around. Ancelotti was there already (do you want to keep this retread carousel going). If you can't get Pep, which you certainly can't right now, who are you going to sign?

What I would do is (1) throw my full backing behind Mourinho. He'll only act more like a baby if he believes he's on his way out. And the players need to know they can't just tank this season and then impress the new guy. And (2) give him an obscene war chest in the summer. He did well to win the league with this group last season, and it was a mistake not to freshen up the squad. Imagine a Chelsea Summer of '16 that resembles City's Summer of '15, when they bought Sterling, De Bruyne and Otamendi. I'd free up the funds and target the following:

(i) Jon Stones to replace Terry. The D is paying a price for old legs right now. Zouma is a player, and combining him with the classy, poised Stones would be a big first step in reshaping this back four...

(ii) A more athletic left back to replace Ivan. This team suffers from the absence of an attacking threat at that spot. Someone who can do what we saw Moreno doing at times today, or what Bellerin does for Arsenal, would add an important dimension to a boring attack. Jose will insist on a competent defender, but as we've seen with Willian you can find players with the right mix of talent and work ethic if you're willing to pay them enough.

(iii) A dynamic striker. Remy and Falcao offer so very little. They neither replicate what Costa does nor offer something stylistically different. There is no attractive Plan B up top.

(iv) A special talent to reinforce the attacking midfield. Oscar, Cesc, Pedro and Willian are a nice mix. But when Cesc plays deeper (and we are seeing a trend in England of playing an on-the-ball play-maker like Cesc or Cazorla next to a defensive MF) they don't have a ton to work with to compliment Hazard. Selling KDB was an obvious error, but imagine what inserting Sterling and KDB into the Chelsea squad this summer could have done to reinvigorate a struggling attack.

A fit Courtois. The talent already in place. Supplemented by several acquisitions--the finest money can buy and hand-picked by Jose to fit his style of play. Coached by an elite manager, backed to the hilt by ownership and unburdened by CL football.

That's a terrifying possibility for me.

As a supporter of a rival club it seems MUCH more ideal for the rest of the league for Roman to sack him, appoint whoever to finish the season, then make a hopeful run a Pep or Jogi Low.

saying goodbye to the bridge?

Props to the FA for finally putting a lid on the bullying and intimidation of officials after every single non-winning game

Wtf gomis.

Cech worth 5 points so far this season.

gomy is awful

bring in the 2015 version of Avram Grant, from way out leftfield

I really want to just fast forward to next season

jose being a proven winner at chelsea blah blah blah is so overblown, go look at the record of the not mou chelsea managers since roman turned up. its, like, the same

only thing jose had was his i never lose at home record, and now he always loses at home so w/e

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxloiVgJE8M

Mourinho press conference. 6 minutes long so presumably more than "i have nothing to say" on a loop for 6 minutes.

Klopp also got sabotaged by injuries, departures, and some fairly extreme conversion data on both ends (2nd to Bayern in shots/shots allowed as people have mentioned) in a way that Jose hasn't been. Jose lost no one he didn't want to lose and hasn't been hit by anything terrible on the injury front apart from the keeper. A comparable circumstance for Chelsea would have been Costa leaving for Manchester City and Hazard and Fabregas having large parts of their seasons ruined by injury.

That said, I just made a tl;dr post explaining why I'd still keep him. There's no question it's been shocking, but August-to-October is also a fairly small sample size, and we've seen age/title hangovers wreck havoc before (though I'm aware this is a historically inept title defense).

the thing about Chelsea I don't understand is why is Mou such a pussy with his fullbacks?

It's not as if at Real Madrid he binned off Marcelo, why is he playing with a right footer at LB and a CB at RB?

Couple that with a central defense that likes to sit deep and I mean I know Hazard has been terrible but where are the runners creating gaps for him?

LOL Rooney