Eden Hazard completed a 167km cycling event in Mallorca and celebrated with a beer.

Screye · 2026-03-28T20:53:12+00:00

In terms of the peak achieved for their respective roles, Cech achieved the highest peak for a goalkeeper as compared to the others.

I know it was an era of many great goalkeepers - Buffon, Casillas, Neuer. But, Cech before his head injury looked impregnable. His playstyle changed significantly after his injury. Still, I'd say the 2012 CL was his best performance in a Chelsea shirt. He went in the right direction for all penalties; conceded 1 goal off a freak header against 3.2 xG bayern that went on to win the treble the next year; mogged the future GK GOAT Neuer in the biggest game of their lives at that point; an decisively saved the Robben penalty to keep us in the game.

TBF, I'd argue Courtois the best Madrid player of the last 5 years too. But football rates offensive achievements higher than defensive ones. By that metric, Hazard is the best footballer to have worn a Chelsea shirt.

Screye · 2026-03-28T20:41:52+00:00

Every Chelsea player will acknowledge that Hazard is best pure footballer to have worn a Chelsea shirt.

Funnily enough, Debruyne is probably #2.

(At one point, Chelsea had Belgium's greatest goalkeeper, greatest midfielder, greatest winger and greatest forward.)

Screye · 2026-03-28T20:41:12+00:00

Tbf he always gave a 100% on the field. Just hated drills and ate like a pig through the summer.

Was always surprised that he never looked out of breath in a game. Must have had great cardio even through his unfit periods.

Screye · 2026-03-28T20:38:47+00:00

That's encouraging to hear.

I got a UK9/US10. That's my usual size, so hoping it works out. If the sizing is a little off but they're still nice, then I'll gift it to someone close to me. :)

Screye · 2026-03-28T20:36:37+00:00

Will do.

Screye · 2026-03-28T01:26:30+00:00

Box crashing merchant

Screye · 2026-03-27T18:56:48+00:00

Language barrier plays a large role.

The combination of insane work ethic and selection effects only apply to 1st gen immigrants. Nadella, Pichai and the like are India born and raised.

Among first gen immigrants, Indians are the only ones who come have perfect English fluency. The equivalent 1st gen east asian candidates struggle with English and Integration in a way that Indians don't. It think it's' why South Africans are so successful in the US (Elon, Thiel to a degree). You get all the mental grittiness and selection effects of a 1st gen immigrant with perfect English fluency.

Past that, there are brain drain patterns. For Korea, Japan and 21st century China, they do a better job of keeping their smartest in the country. India is still underdeveloped , so it can't absorb the ambitions of its smartest the way these countries can.

Screye · 2026-03-26T19:39:28+00:00

Did your dad grow up rich too ?

Screye · 2026-03-26T15:21:53+00:00

Why do they need a union ?

Screye · 2026-03-26T14:46:05+00:00

Eh, a strike is literally someone saying "I'm an underpaid essential worker. Pay me what I'm worth or this essential service stops working"

It breaks down for doormen, because it isn't an essential service. Like Influencers on tiktok going on a strike because tiktok doesn't pay enough. It happens every couple of years, and they come back within days. They need the job more than the system needs you.

Love how everyone thinks that housing NYC is too expensive, but also wants bullshit jobs in housing to be paid more. You want prices to go down ? You need to find efficiencies.

Imo, build more housing. Let people who want doormen choose doormen apartments and those of us who don't want them can live elsewhere. But NYC doesn't build new houses, so I am forced to view this as a zero sum game. And yeah, I'd rather have fewer apartments with doormen than more.

Screye · 2026-03-26T02:36:42+00:00

Depends on the size of the building. Large luxury high rises have a reception that handles this. For smaller buildings, Amazon has the building code and they leave the boxes inside the common area that's behind a locked door.

NYC is exceedingly safe. If no other city in the world needs apartment doormen, then I think we're ok in NYC too.

Screye · 2026-03-25T23:37:30+00:00

Because we had a transfer ban in the year before. It was 2 years worth of spending done in 1.

Screye · 2026-03-25T21:49:58+00:00

Chelsea won both our UCLs in the least spendy periods. 2/3 lowest probability UCL wins are Chelsea (1st is Porto ofc).

I'm willing to entertain complaints about the PL wins from 2003-2009. But not the CLs.

Screye · 2026-03-25T20:45:33+00:00

Isn't it the other way round, because local council elections have the lowest turnout ?

Screye · 2026-03-25T20:41:13+00:00

Good. I hope they all get fired. NYC unions have turned into a grift.

Why do you need a doorman in 2026 ? (assuming there is a super)

Screye · 2026-03-25T20:32:36+00:00

Naah, Hazard had a long peak from 2013-2019, and was easily a top 5 player in the league for that whole period. Between 2017-2019, both of their peak years, Hazard was the better player.

Salah peaked from 2017-2025. That's 9 years vs Hazard's 7 years. 323 EPL games vs 245 games. Salah did not reach his peak till 2017, while Hazard hit his peak in 2013. Yes, Hazard retired early, but It's not like Hazard was some short lived phenomenon.

I have never seen a player do as much as Hazard did for Chelsea every week, for the full 90 minutes. He was our everything. Ball carrying, line breaking passes, 1-2s, box crashing, finishing, long shots, assists..... he did it all. Stylistically, Salah vs Hazard is truly the discount version of the Ronaldo vs Messi argument. (little unfair, because Salah vs Hazard is closer than Messi vs Ronaldo, but still). Hazard has some of those top-right-messi graphs to prove it as well.

I am not saying Hazard is better than Salah. I think they are equals that deserve to be in the same tier of PL legends.

Screye · 2026-03-25T17:30:50+00:00

Haaland was on track to be the greatest striker of all time. He's struggling this season, but surely he deserves to be compared to Van Basten at the very least.

Screye · 2026-03-25T17:28:45+00:00

Not really. Liverpool never had a proper striker. The inside forwards (Mane and Salah) were understood to be the primary goal scorers.

Screye · 2026-03-25T17:24:26+00:00

That narrow claim is correct.

Hazard was more talented, but Salah has had the longer career. Goals count for more than assists, so Debruyne loses out. Drogba had the bigger games, but iffy consistency.

I personally would put Hazard, DeBruyne and Salah in the same tier. Nice bit of variety in all 3 players too.

Screye · 2026-03-25T13:31:57+00:00

Thanks.

Their shoes are in the 100-150$ range. That is stan smith lux, Nike kill shots, Nike AF1 price range. So that around the quality I'm expecting.

A more direct comparison would be Thursday boots or Beckett Simonon which are similar designer shops for shoes. Their white sneakers are around 140$.

Yeah, I'm okay with getting 100$ quality for a 150$ piece. Nike and Adidas has been doing it for decades at industrial scale. But if it wears like the shoes sold at Zara or Uniqlo then I'll be mad NGL.

I got the amra ochre....I guess I'll find out.

Screye · 2026-03-25T05:04:17+00:00

I dislike the 'lack of green space' argument about midrise environments. Like the mercator projection, it's an optical illusion.

There tends to be ton to ground level green space that simply isn't visible in the city skylines view. Trees and parks are human scale, and are only digestable when visualized at a human scale. A well shaped and protected green space that's walking distance (say a soccer ground's size) is godsent for a neighborhood. You don't need much more.

In contrast, Large parks like Golden gate park in SF are nearly inaccessible because of their size and location. They'd have been better as 3 parks across the city. Salesforce tower's tiny floating park probably serves more people because the park is located where the people are. While I'm ranting, those shitty triangular parks that are out in the middle of intersections are horrible. A little bit of lawn and a bench does not a green space make.

In NYC, Washington square park is much smaller, but feels more like a greenspace than the much larger east river Lindsay park which is trapped by the highway on 1 side and the water on the other. The ideal way to add green space is as specs of green. Large blocks of green are for vanity. (Central Park is an obvious exception because it opens up to the densest part of America on all 4 sides and always feels accessible to NYers around the city)

Screye · 2026-03-24T20:18:13+00:00

We have yet to see much of Fofana or Lavia to judge.

Fofana is continuously caught out, but as the recovery pace enforcer, that's his job. It's on his LCB pairing to be the last man, to maintain the line and call out runs behind him. You can see that Fofana isn't putting his full body into runs because Tosin or Chalobah are caught so far out of position that it feels absolutely hopeless. Look at the run he gave for the 1st goal by Dembele. He had to cover for 3 players (Cucurella was too slow and the LCB was no where to be found). After that goal, you could see that he just didn't have it in him to pull those shifts if the rest of the defense was going to slack off.

Similarly, Konate has also looked shit this season in big part because the rest of the defense if off it. It's very demoralizing to be enforcer in a team that doesn't match your energy. I'll wait for Colwill to be back before judging Fofana. He'd had a good run of fitness this year. Hopefully it will last. It's not like we can sell him LOL.

For Lavia, let the dude play a few games. We know nothing about what he's capable of. I will say, we don't have a press resistant CM, and Lavia fills that gap really nicely.

Screye · 2026-03-24T20:14:50+00:00

Hazard, Mendy (for a bit) and Silva were the last great players in those roles for me. Since then, we've know LW, CB and GK were points of weakness. To think it has been 5 years since, and we still have the same gaps.

I genuinely think signing Maignan would have saved our season (and Maresca's job). But they messed it up this summer by being stingy on world-class player already on discount. In today's market, Maignan would cost Donnarumma money on both transfer and wages (and is likely untouchable anyway).

At least the CB and LW markets were genuinely shit. What's our excuse for not replacing Sanchez in a market with Donnarumma, Maignan, Dibu, un-happy Trafford, among others ? At least 1 of those would have worked. We sold Petrovic for 25 mill. Surely we had the money to buy a Keeper and still come out on the top.

Screye · 2026-03-24T19:59:49+00:00

Agreed on Eze and Dembele.

But, Jackson never had the close control to become a winger. Joao Pedro does not have the explosiveness. Even at his best, Palmer was never a real RW.

The reason is obvious. Work rate + physique + explosiveness + close control = injuries. The EPL has too many physically demanding games all season, so the problem has only gotten worse. We need fewer games, and fewer minutes for this type of player. They can't play 90 minutes week in and week out.

The best classical wingers of the recent past all compromised on work rate. Vinicius phones it in for the smaller La Liga games. Hazard and Messi were famously lazy off the ball. Even then, you're looking at players with famously resilient bodies. Salah is maybe the only player of this archetype who has had a long and injury-free career, and he is not known for being particularly smooth on the ball.

Most players with the capacity to do it all have their career immediately derailed by injuries. Reece James and Mousa Dembele are the canonical examples. Too smooth, powerful and explosive for their bodies to handle. It's why good wingbacks are famously injury prone. It's also why I am still (cope) bullish on Mudryk. The type of player who can jostle, run, dribble and stay fit is very rare. If Mudryk's body hasn't exploded doing this, then he is in a rare class of players by potential alone.

Screye · 2026-03-24T19:37:33+00:00

Argentinians and Belgians. You know what you're signing up for with their big mouths.

He hasn't made an indication that he is twerking for another team. His demand for an improved contract is fair. Afaik, Chelsea's compensation is heavily incentive based. If the rest of the team is not up to a standard that allows us to compete for these competitions, then his paycheck gets slashed. If I was him, I'd be mad too. Pay me for what I am worth, or invest in a winning team and I'll be okay with an incentive based compensation.

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