The elephant in the room….. could this club face a relegation battle in the 22/23 season?

The Hilton

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:lol:

This thread is comedy gold, can't believe I haven't seen it before.

I know the caf can be melodramatic, but this thread and some of the ridiculous takes are embarrassing.
 

Lost bear

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One of those posts to which is appended the legend: This aged well.
 

Crashoutcassius

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Fixed it for you. Stop scapegoating an interim guy that came in partway thru a season.
That's what the thread is based on, his form. Not based one ole or Jose coming second. Also based on the idea that Ralf showed how bad the squad was by the level of performances being so low... What a hero
 

Ted Lasso

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That's what the thread is based on, his form.
Ole had an equally bad run that put us in that position prior. Always felt being critical of Ralf alone as being rather shortsighted. And if you're pinning a relegation battle the next season on the interim from the last season that didn't get backed...it's quite silly
 

RyRy11

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I think "relegation" for any of the big teams just won't happen unless there's a couple years of decline beforehand. Chelsea have genuinely been awful this season but weren't really close to relegation. Everton is the closest to a big team that could go down but its been in the making for years. We've played some absolute dire football over the past 10 years but the lowest we've finished is 8th. People rightly were downbeat after the poor start but we were never going down.
 

Crashoutcassius

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Ole had an equally bad run that put us in that position prior. Always felt being critical of Ralf alone as being rather shortsighted. And if you're pinning a relegation battle the next season on the interim from the last season that didn't get backed...it's quite silly
Yeah it's a stupid thread. Everyone here is laughing at the thread. But the reason the thread is here is because Ralf made us look so bad on the pitch and went to the presser and said how it was all down to the lack of quality on the pitch. Then a proper manager just came in and coached the players and suddenly nobody thinks we are going to finish 20th or even mid table.
 

Blood Mage

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:lol: We really were shocking in our first two games but fair play to Ten Hag he turned things around rapidly. That 14km run worked wonders!
 

Ted Lasso

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Yeah it's a stupid thread. Everyone here is laughing at the thread. But the reason the thread is here is because Ralf made us look so bad on the pitch and went to the presser and said how it was all down to the lack of quality on the pitch. Then a proper manager just came in and coached the players and suddenly nobody thinks we are going to finish 20th or even mid table.
Indeed it is. We've finally got a manager I feel really good about both in terms of our style and his ability to improve players here dramatically. Seeing the Lindelof and AWB , it's kind of awesome.
 

Pintu

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The superstitious in me never dared laugh at this thread before…

Happy to read it now
 

Tyrion

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:lol:

This thread is comedy gold, can't believe I haven't seen it before.

I know the caf can be melodramatic, but this thread and some of the ridiculous takes are embarrassing.
Go back two weeks and plenty of posters were loudly insisting we'd drop out of top 4 and reveal we're as bad as last year. There's a sort of fan here just waiting to have a meltdown every game
 

Chief123

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- First search my username in this thread to see if I posted like a muppet back in August? No I didn’t. Great. Let’s laugh at those who did.

- You absolute muppets! This aged well!
 

Tyrion

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- First search my username in this thread to see if I posted like a muppet back in August? No I didn’t. Great. Let’s laugh at those who did.

- You absolute muppets! This aged well!
I did the same and found this:

If we lose to Arsenal, there'll be another of these.

Whenever we lose, there's an immediate 4 or 5 "we're shit" threads on the front page that get released by the cafe like ink from an octopus.
It could have been a lot worse.
 

glasgow 21

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Go back two weeks and plenty of posters were loudly insisting we'd drop out of top 4 and reveal we're as bad as last year. There's a sort of fan here just waiting to have a meltdown every game
The wee love OLE brigade were having kittens and the thought of Liverpool catching us. They will all be in the self help WhatsApp group after tonight.
 

Tyrion

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The wee love OLE brigade were having kittens and the thought of Liverpool catching us. They will all be in the self help WhatsApp group after tonight.
What makes you think it was the Ole fans? It seems to me some of our fans just confuse pessimism with intelligence.
 

SilentWitness

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Every time this thread gets bumped and I see that I've posted in it I shit myself.
 

Lecland07

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To be fair, the title does say 'this club'; just no one knew they were talking about Chelsea, not even the OP.
 
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Fixed it for you. Stop scapegoating an interim guy that came in partway thru a season.
It's not scapegoating at all. Rangnick had the most delusional cult I've seen on this board (and that's saying something considering the state of some of the Mourinho, Ole, even LvG loyalists over the years).

The post you quoted was a serious take peddled by loads and loads of people this time last year, when we were getting tonked by literally everyone and the manager was in front of the media every week saying he needs 10 new signings to have a sniff of competing, and the cultists were in full force saying he was doing the club a favour by "exposing" this toxic group of players.

I distinctly remember asking one of the most vocal ones at the start of this season what it would take for them to accept that Rangnick may just have been a shit manager: if we hit 75 points in the league with the majority of the starting XI consisting of the same toxic players as last season, would they zip it?

Here we are with top four secured, one win away from hitting that 75-point benchmark, with 7 of this season's first XI consisting of existing players (naturally, Martinez, Eriksen and Casemiro have been excellent and Antony has been okay), and three of the most popular scapegoats from last season in Rashford, Shaw, and Fernandes have been among the best players.

Almost as if the solution to last season's garbage was to replace the manager with someone competent and sign a handful of top players that anyone could tell you we desperately needed. And not to "burn it all down, expose these players, and start again", or whatnot.

Pour one for Rangnick indeed.
 

Todd

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Chelsea finished 3rd last season. On paper, they looked like they'd be competing for top 4 this season. And here they are, only three wins separating them from a legitimate relegation battle.

Things happen. Glad it never became an actual concern, but we shouldn't forget that nobody's too big to go down.
 

DOTA

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The most shocking thing about this thread is it not being Skills who started it.
 

Flying high

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To be fair to the OP, this thread was made before we signed Casemiro. Had we not signed him, who knows how bad it could have been.
 

Nero

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Wouldn't expect anything less from the most negative fan forum on the internet.
 

FreakyJim

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We overdid it with 30+ extra points. Would've been ok with 40, now because ETH wanted to show off we're in this CL mess!
 

MadDogg

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That's what the thread is based on, his form. Not based one ole or Jose coming second. Also based on the idea that Ralf showed how bad the squad was by the level of performances being so low... What a hero
Yet again I have to point out that we were actually worse under Ole last season, despite him having the squad that he himself built and had spent a couple of years training. Ralf came in to that dressing room that was already completely broken, lost Greenwood a couple of weeks later, and still did better than Ole was. ETH also started similarly at the beginning of this season when he was mostly using the same players, and it wasn't until he got more of his own players into the squad that we really picked up. Rangnick's '10 new signings' comment that is always bought up was over the course of a couple of years (for some reason people seem to make out he wanted it all at once), and that's pretty much exactly what we're going to do considering we made five for this season and everyone still says we need at least one striker, a couple of midfielders, a goalkeeper and perhaps a rightback and centreback.

Rangnick certainly didn't do well, but he also wasn't the 'ABSOLUTE WORST EVER' that a lot of people seem to make out.
 

Suv666

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Rangnick certainly didn't do well, but he also wasn't the 'ABSOLUTE WORST EVER' that a lot of people seem to make out.
He absolutely was. It was clear from day one he was here to audition for a different gig and had zero interest in Utd. Spend his whole tenure slating the squad to make sure his reputation stayed intact
 

Herman Toothrot

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Cleansing ourself of Ronaldo was what was needed. So fecking glad I don't have to listen to anyone bleat about his 'incredible' goal return from 2021/22 anymore.
 

Doodah

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To the people who are now having a good laugh and acting all clever, let me remind you that the start of the season was THAT bad, and nobody could have predicted that we'd be where we are today.

If you did predict that, why didn't you take out a bet and why aren't you a millionaire today?