For those of you blowing up at Carlo - yes, he has made mistakes, but I saw this and thought, he is doing bloody well to even have us in the conversation for a top 6 berth.
Look at the depth Chelsea have in every position - we are so far away from having a squad capable of competing consistently, yet only 3 points separates us! I'd argue that 90% of their 'bench' players would walk into our starting XI
Take a deep breath, give the man a couple more windows and we will hopefully be in a position to really push in the next couple of years. Let's drop the week to week reactive rubbish.
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Its an unbelievable squad. So much so that they can afford to loan out Barkley and Loftus Cheek and it doesn’t even impact them. We’d take either of them to get in our team ahead of Davies Siggurdson or Delph, and these are players who can’t even make Chelsea’s squad. They might not even finish top either, they might be third or fourth. That’s the challenge Ancelotti is against, it’s not a league which has one super power and anyone who puts a run together can make the CL. It’s a league with arguably 5 of the best squads in world football in it and some of the best managers in the world in Guardiola, Mourinho, Klopp, Bielsa.
‘yeah but Ancelotti got tactically done by Steve Bruce so he must be rubbish’
This is a long restoration job and rather than taking this on a game by game basis or even a stretch of a few games this needs to be looked at long term. The squad he picked up was extremely poor, Richarlison and Digne were genuine quality added to a mix of long term injuries and players who are frankly championship standard (Kenny, Davies, Sigurdsson, Schneiderlin, Niasse, Martina, Besic, Bolasie Garbutt etc.). He didn’t have much financial wiggle room given the FFP constraints from our previous poor recruitment. The squad mentality was through the floor, we’d been a year without winning away from home recently, and three managers had recently been fired.
Despite all of this he’s got a group of players that aren’t his own performing at 1.58 ppg over 29 games. That’s 60 points and probably European football over a season if we continue with that. The players he’s brought in (despite some ludicrous criticism of them) are now amongst our best ones (James and Allan). He’s completely revolutionised DCL into a top striker and had Keane Coleman and Holgate playing better than they had in ages last season and the start of this (injuries aside).
I just don’t know how people can’t see there’s been long term improvement. Yes one off games are annoying and there’s been some questionable team line ups and bad performances but this current team is loads better than the one that had Davies and Sigurdsson in a two in midfield. The football is miles better to watch also. There’s been two games this season at Southampton and Newcastle where’d I’d say we were ‘boring’. Every other game I’ve enjoyed watching is and we’ve carried a threat even at the expense of us being open at the back.
