I loved Vidal at Juve. Something about how he made his name in Serie A (though I presume he was decent at Leverkusen), was part of an outstanding midfield that dominated the division, was equally aggressive and technical, took fantastic penalties and was from Chile…made him seem…almost mythical to me. Like he was a hark back to the 90s when Italian teams had all the best players over there. Juve’s stripes add to that, for me
His moves to Bayern and now Barca have burst that bubble and now he’s just another UCL-level midfielder (i.e. very good but unremarkable).
Morata has looked okay in the last couple of games to be fair to him, but I don’t think there’s any way that confidence issue can be patched up. Some of those misses from last season were quite breathtaking.
Honestly, I guess Real knew what they were doing with Morata. I rarely watched him play but his stats off the bench for them seemed impressive, and he’s fairly technically gifted, but he was coming on against teams that were finished and tapping a few in. If they thought he could lead the line they wouldn’t have got rid of him
Glad United up with Lukaku instead – especially as Real were quoting us £90m for Morata, rather than the £60m they sold him to you for. Lukaku’s far from perfect, but his game is improving, and you can’t question his drive and mentality
I really want him to prove his doubters wrong, but every impression I get of him is Torres when he lost his mojo, and at that young an age it’s a bit of a worry.
Lukaku’s such a weird one. I’ll be in a pub or something with a Utd match on in the background and he’ll have had, like, 4 touches in the box, mis-control everything, get a great chance and sky it, etc. Then we’ll move pubs or whatever and by the time we get to the next one he’ll have scored a perfect hat-trick or something. If he can get to his top form and stay there he’ll be basically unstoppable.
He has a lot of flaws in his game, which I initially thought put major questions about whether he could play for a top club. But at the same time, he’s maybe the most driven forward we’ve had since Ronaldo. He’ll keep working, keep learning, keep improving. His build up play was supposedly terrible, but it’s got way better. When everyone else has given up on the pitch, he’s giving his everything. You can coach a player to improve his skills, but you can’t teach a player that kind of determination
Dont watch him week in week out, but his first touches are (currently) more often terrible than good. But so much positives wrt to game intelligence.
Hope he does well
We’re drafting in some absolutely random Brazilian in to play whenever Fernandinho’s serving one of his ten suspensions next season. Honestly think the Jorginho signing’s one of the biggest window doings we’ve endured in modern times.
was about to say that Robinho was the last bit of business that went wrong for city, but then I remembered Mangala. I also believe that you parted with money, however small the fee, for Caballero and Bravo.
For context, I had about an hour long discussion with a fellow Chelsea fan today about how much of a disgrace the whole de Bruyne thing was.
Mangles and Fernando were an obscure Portuguese agent/scout scam that everybody at City’s too embarrassed to get to the bottom of, of that I am certain. Big Willy did win us a trophy (of sorts) at the expense of Liverpool, so will always have a place in our hearts.
We’ve tightened up a bit more recently, but we’ve done plenty of terrible business since the take-over - everyone Hughes was allowed to buy, that season the board let Mancini know what they thought of him by getting him Jack Rodwell, Scott Sinclair and Javi Garcia, Jovetic, Bony, definitely others I’ve purposefully forgotten… and a stream of young talent’s gone the other way. There’ll be a de Bruyne amongst them, I wouldn’t doubt it.