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Chelsea Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread 2011/2012
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A short Clip of the goals from Today
Piazon's goal is special0 -
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Likelier to head more in the direction of palm trees than deep fried Mars bars!gavredking wrote: »Poor Torres should go on loan to Celtic/Rangers and score 20 goal, get his confidence back. :pac:
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Flipping heck, daily mail has us going in for 20 mill Jack rodwell - practically a done deal as well!
They also report something I wondered myself - will the mighty Essien ever play again and get his place back?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2076329/Jack-Rodwell-Chelsea-20m-EXCLUSIVE.html0 -
Sgt Pepper 64 wrote: »Flipping heck, daily mail has us going in for 20 mill Jack rodwell - practically a done deal as well!
They also report something I wondered myself - will the mighty Essien ever play again and get his place back?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2076329/Jack-Rodwell-Chelsea-20m-EXCLUSIVE.html
I can see Rodwell moving to centreback0 -
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gavredking wrote: »:eek:
:eek:
Slightly disturbed by that pic ha.
I'm more than slightly disturbed that I can't stop staring at 'his' left nip. :eek:0 -
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Bit like Kakuta thengavredking wrote: »He'll have to go out on loan if he wants to progress, he runs the risk of not reaching his full potential, he still has a load of time though.0
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gavredking wrote: »I dont think Kakuta has a future here but ya never know, he coudl do a Sturridge and come on leaps and bounds, seems unlikely though.
From what I have read, the guy has bags of talent and shows that in training and his attitude is good. Trouble is, he is not getting a run of games to prove that, so much the same as Danny experienced. He just needs someone to start him in a few games.0 -
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gonzovision wrote: »Think we better sign a center back in January......
We needed one as it is, we now need 2, and you'll be dam sure the selling team will make us pay expensive for him 0 -
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From the Chelsea website : 20 YEARS OF THE PREMIER LEAGUE
http://www.chelseafc.com/page/LatestNews/0,,10268~2553874,00.html
Brings back some memories this article.
The Premier League is in its 20th year this season, and Chelsea is one of just seven clubs to have been present for every one of them.
The club, and football generally, has changed dramatically since Mick Harford scored against Oldham Athletic in a 1-1 draw at Stamford Bridge on August 14, 1992 and few clubs have benefited quite so much as ourselves.
A mid-table side in the early 1990s, we were expected to be battling relegation far more than we were challenging for top honours - it was 1971 when we had last won a trophy and since then the club had undergone several rebuilding processes due to relegation and financial hardship.
As well as major honours coming our way, Stamford Bridge has since been transformed from a dilapidated mishmash of tin, steel and concrete into an all-seated venue capable of hosting almost 42,000 people. That this number no longer satisfies demand is testimony to how far Chelsea has come since mass resignation from the Football League in February 1992.
Three months later the Premier League was formed, with satellite TV broadcasters Sky declaring 'a whole new ball game' to promote their multi-million pound deal. This, set against the backdrop of the Taylor Report and a growing appetite for the game after the national team's success at Italia '90, made for an exciting period of change.
'When the Premier League came along the professionalism really changed and clubs started following a more European model, improving diets and medical regimes, combined with more money coming into the game,' recalls Blues legend Graeme Le Saux.
'It was a combination of a few factors, the money encouraged more foreign players to want to come here but also allowed clubs the leverage to go and buy them and improve their facilities.
'I don't think anybody could have predicted it would expand to the global level that it has, even the Premier League organisation itself. It really does dominate club competitions across the world now.'
At the start of the 1992/93 season, Erland Johnsen was our sole overseas representative, one of just 11 across the division at that time. Dmitri Kharine and Jakob Kjeldberg would soon follow, with Chelsea one of the first to recognise the potential of signing top-class foreign talent.
After four years spent away from the club while he won the league with Blackburn, Le Saux barely recognised the Chelsea he re-joined in 1997.
'The quality of the players in the squad and the level they were playing at gave me a great opportunity to finish what I had started at Chelsea and I felt I had my best years in that second spell. I was the first current England international the club had bought since Reg Matthews in the 1950s, and a British record for a defender at the time,' he recalls.
'It was very cosmopolitan, and groups of us would spend time together socially in London which was going through a great phase at that time too. There was a fantastic atmosphere between the core of that team, and from a personal point of view I think it was the happiest time of my career. '
Johnsen was a Chelsea man throughout that development, joining from Bayern Munich in 1989 and not leaving until '97.
'Chelsea started changing when Glenn Hoddle came in 1993,' says the Norwegian. 'The club went from an amateur level to a professional level, talking about what we were eating, the way we trained, the facilities. Then Ruud Gullit took over and took it on, and the other managers too. It was interesting for me to go through this because there had been some difficult times for Chelsea before that.'
Those difficult times had included chairman Ken Bates, who had bought the club for just £1 and took on its debts in 1982, undergoing a lengthy battle to protect Stamford Bridge from property developers. That is a story recently brought back to the fore with the recent Chelsea Pitch Owners vote.
Like Le Saux, Nigel Spackman was a Chelsea player in two different spells and is able to remember the Bridge prior to its mid-90s renovation. The Shed terrace had its last outing in May 1994, and by 2001 the West Stand had been completed to give us the modern look we now know so well.
'I was there during the two spells, in the '80s and coming back in the early '90s, almost 10 years on, and it shows how things were starting to move on for Chelsea, going from this oval-shape stadium with the vast areas behind the goals to the more compact stadium that we have today,' Spackman says.
'With the Matthew Harding and the new Shed End being brought in it was a more compact football stadium, as it is today and it was great to see that development.'
By that point things were picking up on the field too. An FA Cup in 1997 became the club's first silverware in a generation, and the fans were positively spoiled over the next couple of years with a League Cup and Uefa Cup Winners' Cup in 1998, and another FA Cup in 2000.
Success breeds success of course, and it also attracts more talent.
Asked when Chelsea first came on to his radar, Florent Malouda highlights the capture of some of his compatriots during this period.
'I think that was when Bernard Lambourde signed for Chelsea!' he joked. 'There were other French players coming and signing for the Blues and that's when I followed Chelsea, with Frank Leboeuf, Marcel Desailly, Didier Deschamps, then George Weah, big players coming to play for Chelsea.
'When they came and William Gallas and Makelele followed, I always felt that when I became a professional footballer that one day I could play for this club.'
Had Malouda joined anytime before late 2004, he would have been startled at the facilities he found for his first training session.
The ex-players all argue the biggest difference to them from the Chelsea of old to the Chelsea of new are the facilities used from day to day for practice.
Malouda can count himself lucky he never experienced the conditions at Harlington, right beneath the Heathrow Airport flight path, where changing rooms had to be given over to university students on Wednesday afternoons.
'The facilities they have now compared to what we had at Harlington are chalk and cheese,' Spackman explains. 'The game's progressed in every area and for me as an ex-player I'd have much rather been going to Cobham to train and do my stuff than Harlington.
'I think sometimes it's not until players leave Chelsea and go on to other routes that they'll look back and respect what Chelsea have and there's a great work ethic at the training ground that relates on to the Stamford Bridge pitch.'
'Somebody at the club must have placed some value on the facilities at Harlington, and that was probably the biggest problem we had holding us back,' says Le Saux. 'The club failed to invest in those facilities at that time, I don't think the chairman could see a commercial gain in it.'
Drawn to the excitement of English football, and particularly a club at the heart of its fashionable capital, Roman Abramovich purchased the club in 2003 to give us the final ingredient to turn from Premier League contender into Premier League power - not just money to spend on players, but the ability to upgrade the environment in which they worked - and we switched to Cobham in 2004 on the way to sealing our first Championship victory in 50 years.
The players of the early Premier League days might not have that achievement, but as Le Saux says, 'Thankfully, Chelsea got there in the end.'
We have since repeated the feat twice, most recently in 2010 when we added another first, The Double, to our trophy cabinet.
The hope now is that we continue adding to it over the next 20 years at football's top table.0 -
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