RoosterMarty wrote:Ridiculous by Rafa to not bring Ba on until so late. His persistence with his golden son Torres will destroy Chelsea's season... hopefully.
I don't know if Rafa's displaying the same stubborness at Chelsea as he did at Liverpool, but in his final few years at Anfield his biggest weakness was that (despite declaring otherwise), he was clearly managing with Europe as his biggest priority, when he'd already scaled that mountain and the club was crying out for an EPL title.
I don't know whether we would have been good enough anyway, but with players like Reina, Arbeloa, Carragher (before he was too old), Mascherano, Alonso, Gerrard and Torres, most of whom were at their peak, we should have been good enough to give it a real shake (more than just the one season we finished a coupla points off).
So I've always felt Rafa was an OK manager in the Premiership, but his better value was in Europe .. For Chelsea though that wouldn't make much sense given the manager they turfed had just won them the Champs League.
Oops, off tangent .. Back to your original point, Rafa never treated Torres as the Golden Son at Liverpool .. In fact fans, players and media were constantly dumbfouned when he would sub Torres off with 20 minutes or more to play of an EPL match in the balance, usually because we had a match in Europe a few days later.