Leicester City won the Premier League last season. Donald Trump is POTUS. Barcelona just recovered from a 4-0 1st leg defeat to knock Paris out of the CL.

and here I am, +1ing a Nic post.

Strange world we live in.

+1

Yea, we have not had much blatant run bad, but again the point is team like Pool have not lost that many games either due to run bad, I dont think our EV is much different to the teams around us.

Also think our squad is leveraging itself much better than any other side, as I said its the same team in the same working really well system week in week out and that has been huge. No way would it be 10 points if Pep was able to pick an optimum system and put out mostly the same players week in week out.

Also 10 points seems reasonably fair squad wise when compared to the weaker teams in the top 6, e.g. Pool and United who just have quite a high number of mehs in their teams.

Would honestly pay four figures if I got some sort of agreement from the city front office to never see navas play again

I disagree.

Spurs and Plop have no depth and relay so heavily on 1 or 2 players. Plops defence is bad too.

Arsenal have no WIM if you will and have hugely missed Cazorla, plus lack a few players in certain positions too last the course.

We can't finish for **** and lack pace. Zlatan is our only player to hit double figures this season, we are half way into March and played more games than anyone.

City are shambles at the back.

Chelsea on the other hand have been solid throughout and don't really have huge weaknesses, neither are they involved in Europe.

Note the word huge. Chelsea deserve to win the league but there should be a sweat. The gap to city/spurs is the same as Madrid to Real Sociedad. If you think those gaps in relative strength are equal then fair enough. I'd say you are comfortably wrong.

Interesting you talk about relying on two players when they've been able to roll out Hazard and Costa every week. I wonder what you explanation is for Chelsea performance last season with mostly the same personnel?

They are on course for 93 point season. Their team just isn't that good.

They had a year off last season, so are fresh

I get what you're saying and I agree there should at least be a sweat in the run in and the gap really shouldn't be as big as it is. I think the gap between Chelsea and Plop/Spurs is about right though. City/Arsenal and us should be closer though.

Its not just names on a list though, its how you use those names, and Pep has been doing a bad job of this.

Also the list is solid all the way through the list, no Bravo, no real mehs, and the one meh we have, Cahill is compensated for perfectly by the system.

Yes we have rolled out Hazard and Costa. Hazard has had quite a few meh/bad games recently, still won, Costa got suspended still won comfortably without even playing a striker.

Anyone have what it was at the start of the season?

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Kante has been huge for Chelsea. Also Pedro has been immense too.

When Costa/Hazard are having bad days, Chelsea have others who step up to the plate. Can't same the same for others.

I know as we've been so reliant on goals from Zlatan.

Pedro (no upgrade over Cuadrado aofrantic ) has been utterly immense this season.

also Alonso & Moses have been incredible wrt expectations, and it's probably fair to give a lot of the credit to Conte

and Kante might be the best player in the league

93 points would put them just behind mourinhos 2005 side, above all fergie teams and the arsenal invincibles. Not close.

That is quite the goal post shift.

What relevance is that to the above discussion?

Just behind the 2005 TSO side seems perfectly fine to me.

People forget, but some not so great players got minutes in that side.

That they are running a good click above their points EV.

Not really, if we had had run bad we would be below present points, if we had run good we would actually be higher.

We are about where we should be due to neutral ev, not been lucky, not been unlucky.

I cant think of a single incident where a bad ref call or outlandish opposition mistake has led to a victory and I cant think of a single game where any such victory would have been underserved. The closest is the Alonso elbow against Arsenal, and we would have beat them whatever.

We have run good with injuries tho.

OK. We disagree.

What actual examples are there of Chelsea run good?

This just seems like Pool fan saltiness at this point.

Lack of external factors.

Agree. Chelsea have been awesome for a good few months now. Fully deserve to be where they are.

You could say you're slightly above EV. I think you could say you where slight fortunate to beat City but apart from that it's been going as expected. Although I did think you'd beat Spurs. Plus the 14 game winning run was obviously +EV.

Chasing pack have had that many **** ups, deserve to be so far behind.

They are 21-3-3.

Barca are 18-6-2, Madrid 18-5-2 and Bayern 17-5-1 in substantially weaker leagues with much better teams.

Main takeaway is lol at the league last year. Think Chelsea are great and have benefited from no CL. 2-4 sweat this year still gonna be really fun

Btw your quarterly villa update:

15th in the championship

Transfer navas to them.