Say who? The fans? Sky's "so called experts", The Red Tops? None of any I would pay the slightest part of attention to when it comes to players.

I dont see what the point was in bring Jose back if we are going to moan about what he does, Everything he has done is in fitting with his management style and we can not say "we did not know what he was like".

Overall a very average window for us, but at least we kept our star players.

Mata is still a chelsea player, even though huge bids came in from PSG, the club did not want him to go. That is very important.

It is becoming important for teams to have "star" players that attract sponsors and bring big money into the club. Bale may have cost £85m but Real are not stupid, they will get that money back from a very bankable down to earth player in terms of shirt sales, interest from the UK media and sponsorship.

The Chelsea tour this summer probably paid for Hazard, he was tremendously popular.

We play with one striker, Thats not going to change, Lakaku is 4th choice, There is a world cup coming up and you could say his main rival for a place in Bentake who will play week in and week out.

I am glad he has gone on loan to Everton rather then back to West Brom in that its a step up from West Brom and what he needed, They have a manager I trust and plays football in the right way.

I like the guy as a player and can see him being something special but he not quite at the level you need to be at Chelsea and you dont have time to learn so makes sense to put him somewhere he can learn

I'm gutted Romelu has gone, but it might be the best thing for him this year. He should get games at Everton (wonder what Mirallas thinks about the move) and it is a step up from his last loan spell. When he comes back next season he'll be 21 and more experienced.

Its the same system we are using with Courtois and has worked very well.

Yes, i hope so.

Its like with anything all you can do is the most logical thing and I do think this is it.

Of course it may fail but the thinking behind it is solid enough.

Think everyone is getting carried away with Fellaini, he was Evertons top goalscorer last season and had his best season because he played behind the striker, he really isn't that good in a center or defensive mid role I think.

Rumours are that ba only would leave for arsenal and didn't want to go back to Newcastle or west ham, therefore our only choice was to keep them both or send out Lukaku on loan. It's disappointing but probably for the best, he will learn a lot at Everton and if he can replicate his form last season there he will come back even better. Hope it works out for him

He was the right one to send out on loan I think, He still very rough around the edges and although there was value in sending Ba to Arsenal from a money point of view, I dont think they would have bought him after the season and while it would have put him in the shop window I see more value in sending Lakaku on loan, We remove some of his wages off our wage bill, Free up a space on the bench and will have a improved player come back to us.

I still think Ba will be of better use to us though out the season then he will at this moment in time

The difference there is, we have a world class keeper in Petr Cech. Our strikers are two ex world class players, one of which we haven't seen, and Demba Ba.
I will be delighted if Samuel Eto'o is anything like the player he used to be, but we're taking a gamble. We know all about Torres, he will score a great goal every few months te remind us of the player he once was, then it will be back to normal.
Demba Ba is a perfectly decent back-up striker, but not really a starter for a club of our stature..in my opinion.
The real problem is not making our move earlier in the summer, the fruitless pursuit of Rooney just went on and on. Now we have to keep our fingers crossed that Eto'o can do the business...or we are in the same position as last season up front.

But they are better then Lakaku, It dont matter if they world class or not. If the system works it dont matter the abilty of the players involved.

Eto was a player who just came available at the last minute due to the money issues with the club, No fee and wages would have been managable and knows the manager so yes a gamble but a calculated one.

I still think we was right with Rooney, He was the only player I could see that would fit in to the system and that was worth the money we was willing to spend. The rest either was too expensive/not the type of player we needed or was not available. Jose would have started planning for this season while at Madrid so was only going to buy players that fitted into that system

I dont think we are in the same position as last year as we have a better manager.

I agree with the last sentence, but not the rest. We can't really say with any certainty that Lukaku would have remained our 4th choice striker.
How good Eto'o is likely to be, we don't know, and there were times over the past couple of seasons when practically anyone would have been preferable to Torres.
I don't know why Rooney would have been our only consideration as a striker, he's started picking up more injuries and often didn't look the same player last season. Surely there were alternative quality strikers around that could have done a job for us ? We were linked with lots of names.
As you say, Mourinho is a great manager and we have to repect his decisions. But I would have waited to see how Eto'o turned out before shipping Lukaku out on loan.

I don't pay any attention to the Red Tops or Sky. I'm quite capable of arriving at my own opinions about the team.

I didn't actually want Mourinho back as i've said before, but now as we've got him I'm prepared to give him a chance, as I would any other manager. Doesn't mean I won't comment on anything I disagree with, like every fan's entitled to.

Torres at the level he is nowadays isn't better than Lukaku. Lukaku may be raw but he actually knows where the goal is (even when playing in a team like West Brom), whereas Torres for the most part plays like he's scared of setting foot in the penalty area. Of course ability of the players matter. It's all well and good having a system, but not if the players aren't good enough to make it work. We can supply a striker with as many chances as we like, but if he's not up to standard then we're still not going to get anywhere.


Same here. We could have waited till January.

Maybe Jose has seen Eto in training and reckons he's still got it. Risky to me but time will tell.

The way i see it we have 2 spots for strikers, One on the pitch and one on the bench, Yes we could put 2 on the bench but I think that bench unbalanced for other places on the pitch. Means we have 2 very unhappy players taking up a place on the team that could be used for a youth team player etc. We have a World Cup coming up and Lakaku needs games to give him a chance of going, Between now and January he could score quite a few goals for a team like Everton which might be the difference between him going and not going. I would rather he went to the World Cup then had a season with us, for his sake as I think he deserves it and for 2/3 years down the line for Chelsea sake

A season at Everton AND a World Cup would turn the boy into a man, He is good enough now but he is just not ready yet, If we had the Champions League final tommrow against Barca and only one striker, He would be good enough to play but he would not be ready to, We need to get him ready and at the moment we dont have the abilty to do that.

Of course Rooney is picking up injuries and dont look like the player of the past, He wants to leave Utd, How many times did we see RVP injured at Arsenal? Players who are not happy often have "injuries", Its just one of those strange things that happen in football.

We might have been linked with lots of names but I think thats a mixture of fan's and media stories. There have only been firm bids for Rooney and I think thats right, After 10 years of very heavy investment and quite abit of sucess we should not be having a long list of players we are after for each place, It should be just one name on it and the only other teams that should have a chance of signing that player are Utd,Barca,Real (City and Munich are close to joining that group) and if they go anywhere else then that shows me they are not football related and if we dont get that player we should get on with what we have, Time and time again are stock reply to our cock ups in the transfer market is to chuck more money at the problem, That dont work ok lets chuck even more money at still no?

Ok lets double it and chuck more money at it, Its got to stop, If our current strikers are not good enough then so be it thats the clubs fault and they have to deal with the mess.

Yes there was other strikers available but Rooney ticked everything off the list of the type of player we needed and I do think we would have got him if SAF was there. The others was good but did not tick off quite as many boxes as Rooney.

Even with the 3 strikers we have Jose should get top 3, Thats the level our manager and team should be at. If he can not then the manager and the board have failed and should go.

We can not just keep chucking more and more money at the problem. We have to be more clincical in our signings. We either get the player we want or we make do with what we have. After all the money thats been invested in Chelsea we should be more then able to do that and if not then heads must roll. The bed has been made, We can not keep buying a new one because we can.

I disagree that 3rd would be acceptable. Even an inferior manager in Benitez achieved that, with a weaker squad than Mourinho has at his disposal this year. At the very least we should be improving on last season's finish, but to be honest this is as good a chance of winning the title as we will have had in a few seasons, especially with Fergie having left United. If we don't win it then it'll be because we didn't strengthen in the right areas over the summer. Don't get me wrong, i'm not advocating sacking Mourinho if we finish 3rd this season, but I don't think we should be satisfied with it.


Yet you have no problems with spending £30m on Willian? Sorry, but it makes no sense to me.

I agree, the money spent on willian was wasted in our current squad. However, we did get eto'o on a free - i prefer to see it as 15m on each.

I also have a feeling that those two players were not the managers decision.

With all the teams around us looking average at the moment, and United in absolute chaos, we should be looking at performing well in the league this season.

Without playing well, we have got off to a good start.

Loaning out Lukaku again may prove sensible, but i wish we had an option to get him back in January if needed.

Again we are going into a season with:

Torres: completely misfiring as usual
Ba: Not given a run at all
Eto'o: 32 and never kicked a ball in this league before

For a team like chelsea, its not good enough. Last year the strikers were not good enough, and we dont seem to have addressed this issue (and that of adding bite to midfield).

You dont go from scraping 3rd (and finishing outside the Champions League spots the years before) to winning it no matter who is in charge nor unless you spend over 100m, We are no where near the level needed to win a title yet, And thats due to the last (at least 3 years) of mismangement. We have bought badly and way to slow, All what we doing now should have been done after the double year, Instead of awful appointments on the manager side and just as bad buys.

Utd and City are ahead of us, I dont buy all this "OMG SAF gone" rubbish they have got a very good manager and a team that won the title without breaking a sweat and one the year before lost it in the last second of the season before on Goal Difference, And City have bought well and are going to be there or there abouts. All we can do is decrease the gap between us and the title. We are not a title winning team, Its going to take a couple of years before we can do that. Its this I WANT IT NOW mentally that has got us in to this mess, Its been 10 years now since Roman bough us and with the level of the league during that time we should have added at least 2 more titles with the tools we had at our disposal (and maybe another Champions League).

Lets for once BUILD something because after spending all this money we have have only been building sandcastles.

We have wasted the first 10 years of the Roman years

The Willian deal came out of nowhere, Same with Eto these players came available at the last minute due to the changes at their club, I have no issue with us seeing a chance and taking a risk, He is a player who will retain a value, Where as Strikers come to us to lose value it seems.

Would I have bought him prob not but I can see why we did not go after spending big on other strikers when it was worth risking losing out on them and going after Rooney

League titles, FA cups, Milk Cups, Champions league, Europa league.

Currently we have the most exciting attacking midfielders of any team in the world.

I wouldnt exactly call it wasted, we just need to build a dynasty.

I'd agree, you can't really call the second most successful club in England in that 10 year period as wasted...

What is clear as you've highlighted is that you need to put something in place to make it enduring... but even then you can only really say Barca have done that... Only the next 5 years will tell if Utd did it, or if SAF made it look like it was enduring.

Not saying we not been a sucess but it should have been more sucessful with the tools Roman has given us. Yes it was good to win the Europa cup and if that came in the 2nd year of Romans time at Chelsea it would have been a sucess BUT it did not, It has to be marked down as how badly we have been run.

We should have at least half way though building a dynasty by now, That is a waste, Any team that had our investement should have had its fair amount of sucess but if you gave the same amount of investment to SAF or Wenger they would have done alot more with it.

But we should have done so much.

Being a sucess with the amount of money spent would have been easy.

Sucess was a shoe in, Its the level of it we need to look at.

Disagree with you that the title is beyond us The_don1. If we don't win it then we should at least be coming very close to it. If we narrowly miss out on it, we'll perhaps be able to look again at our failure to strengthen the right positions over the summer, and think what might have been. We didn't have to spend silly money, we could have just spent the money we did a bit more wisely. Only time will tell though.