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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 17:49:21 GMT
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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 17:57:31 GMT
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Post by nonameface on Jan 11, 2022 17:57:46 GMT
Would be a great signing.
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Post by thehartshillbadger on Jan 11, 2022 17:58:01 GMT
That can’t be his real name!
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Post by cvillestokie on Jan 11, 2022 17:58:22 GMT
Can he tackle and/or pass forward to a player with the same type of shirt on? That would be a major improvement on what we have rigtt but now.
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Post by robwahlmann on Jan 11, 2022 17:58:50 GMT
Could we finally see a decent CDM arrive!!??
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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 18:01:52 GMT
www.goal.com/en-gb/news/villa-chelsea-target-digne-compensation-emerson-recall/bltb33e80e5d0152638Lewis Baker has had an offer from a Ligue 1 club but has rejected it in favour of remaining in English football. The homegrown star, who made his first appearance for Chelsea in eight years at the weekend against Chesterfield in the FA Cup, is happy to wait until his contract expires in west London. Having played in the Netherlands, Turkey and Germany on loan, he hopes for a long-term contract in the English game next season at an upwardly mobile Championship club.
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Post by wagsastokie on Jan 11, 2022 18:02:31 GMT
Can he tackle and/or pass forward to a player with the same type of shirt on? That would be a major improvement on what we have rigtt but now. If he’s got a pulse he’s better than half of them
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Post by thehartshillbadger on Jan 11, 2022 18:05:06 GMT
www.goal.com/en-gb/news/villa-chelsea-target-digne-compensation-emerson-recall/bltb33e80e5d0152638Lewis Baker has had an offer from a Ligue 1 club but has rejected it in favour of remaining in English football. The homegrown star, who made his first appearance for Chelsea in eight years at the weekend against Chesterfield in the FA Cup, is happy to wait until his contract expires in west London. Having played in the Netherlands, Turkey and Germany on loan, he hopes for a long-term contract in the English game next season at an upwardly mobile Championship club. I was getting excited until reading the words “upwardly mobile”👀
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Post by chigstoke on Jan 11, 2022 18:05:20 GMT
This'd do nicely
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Post by silsdenstokie on Jan 11, 2022 18:07:04 GMT
CDM……fingers crossed 🤞🤞
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Post by scfcno1fan on Jan 11, 2022 18:10:36 GMT
Not many appearances when on loan at Leeds, Reading or Middlesbrough.
I’ve never seen him play so won’t pass comment but his lack of appearances is a slight concern.
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Lewis Baker
Jan 11, 2022 18:10:49 GMT
via mobile
a likes this
Post by thehartshillbadger on Jan 11, 2022 18:10:49 GMT
In all honesty if we get this over the line I’d be happy with the window. A striker in the Fletcher but younger mould would be nice but possibly greedy.
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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 18:11:43 GMT
“My conscience is simple,” Mourinho said. “If, in a few years, Baker, Brown and Solanke are not national team players, I should blame myself. Baker, an elegant and mobile two-footed creative midfielder, had already made his debut
Karl Robinson’s eyes light up at the mention of the name.
“What a player,” the Oxford United manager says. “What a player.”
He is casting his mind back to early 2015 when, as manager of MK Dons, he took Baker on loan for the remainder of that season.
“Lewis had the most natural talent of any player I’d seen for a long time,” Robinson says, which is some compliment given that Dele Alli was part of the same MK Dons team. “He was so gifted, and totally two-footed. He would take free kicks with his left foot and corners with his right. I remember a goal he scored for us against Notts County… there was a ball over the top, he broke from midfield and, as it was bouncing two feet up in the air, he brought it down on his knee and just lobbed it beautifully over the keeper.
That is the kind of career path Chelsea’s coaches envisaged for Baker when, after spells at Sheffield Wednesday and MK Dons, he joined Vitesse on a two-year loan in the summer of 2015. Their coach Peter Bosz, who has since moved on to Ajax, Borussia Dortmund and now Bayer Leverkusen, could hardly contain his delight. “He switches feet effortlessly,” he said. “He can shoot great with both feet — corners, free kicks, penalties. It’s unprecedented. Even at the highest level in Europe, you rarely get that.”
Baker’s two years in Arnhem were a success. He didn’t excel to the degree that Mount did, but he made 64 Eredivisie appearances, scoring 15 goals from midfield. He also helped Vitesse win the KNVB Cup, the first major trophy in their 125-year existence. His regular feedback sessions with Eddie Newton, Chelsea’s loan technical coach, and Andy Myers, who was dispatched from Cobham to become Vitesse’s assistant coach during that second campaign, were more than positive.
The feeling at Stamford Bridge was that he needed another loan, either at lower Premier League or upper Championship level, but he was still regarded as a fundamental part of their “Made in Chelsea” project. As an illustration of their faith in him, the club offered him a new five-year contract, which he signed enthusiastically, before going out on loan again. A year at Middlesbrough, in a team tipped to challenge for promotion to the top flight under Garry Monk, was deemed to be the ideal next step.
Moreover, Baker lost his way at Middlesbrough. Having started seven of the first eight matches after his arrival, he fell out of favour, appearing only once more before Monk was sacked in the December. Tony Pulis, who took over, did not warm to the Chelsea youngster either. Over the final seven months of that season, Baker played just 31 minutes of first-team football. As one source puts it, “Tony just didn’t fancy him.”
After that lost season on Teesside, failing to make any headway under two British managers, he was sent to Leeds United to resume his education under Marcelo Bielsa. By the turn of the year, though, he had started just two Championship matches — and been substituted at half-time on both occasions. He was frustrated by his lack of opportunities, as were Chelsea, so the season-long loan was terminated.
Baker’s early departure from Leeds went almost unnoticed, but Bielsa offered a different perspective, saying “I always had a lot of confidence in his skills”, and that “when he left I was feeling that he was very close to becoming an important player in the team”. He appeared sincere in suggesting he had been thinking of retaining Baker for the following season. The Leeds coach offered a similar message after Eddie Nketiah’s unsuccessful loan at the Elland Road last season, saying the Arsenal forward needed time to adapt to a different way of working and was just beginning to meet that standard when he returned to London.
Either way, Baker did not regret leaving Leeds. He went on loan to Reading and, establishing himself immediately, barely missed a game over the remainder of the season, playing an important part in helping them avoid relegation from the Championship.
Progress at last.
But by now he was 24 and his prospects at Chelsea appeared bleak.
After the Vitesse experience, Chelsea shared Brown’s view that he should stay in England for his next loan. In August 2016, they struck a deal with Rotherham United, whose manager Alan Stubbs suggested the youngster had “every chance of playing at the highest level”. Brown scored twice in his first six matches at Championship level, but Stubbs was sacked soon afterwards and his successor, Paul Warne, was initially sceptical about whether the loanee had the work ethic to adapt to his approach.
Warne is happy to say he underestimated Brown, who thrived in the second-striker role behind Danny Ward. Brown was so happy at Rotherham that he was initially hesitant when Chelsea informed him, halfway through the season, that they wished to redirect him to Huddersfield Town. Chelsea’s view was that he would benefit more in a team challenging higher up the second-tier table, a view reinforced by David Wagner and Stuart Webber, Huddersfield’s head coach and sporting director, when he met them. They were right.
The ethos at Huddersfield was all about togetherness and high-intensity, with no room for “big-time” tendencies. What struck Wagner and Webber was the enthusiasm with which Brown embraced that approach. In contrast to his spell at Vitesse, he felt part of something. Brown scored five goals for Huddersfield, including the 25-yard strike at Wolves that clinched their place in the play-offs, where they overcame Sheffield Wednesday and then Reading, returning to the top flight for the first time since 1972.
Huddersfield tried to re-sign him that summer, but another newly-promoted team, Brighton & Hove Albion, beat them to it. He was in and out of the team on the south coast, as Chris Hughton tried to find a winning formula, but he seemed to be adapting to the rhythm of the Premier League when disaster struck — a torn ACL in his right knee — in the opening minutes of an FA Cup tie against Crystal Palace. “Heartbreaking,” he said.
It was the day after his 21st birthday. Another 13 months would pass before he was ready to return to competitive action.
Returning to Chelsea as head coach in July 2019, Lampard no doubt recalled Baker as the club’s next big thing, as one of the stars of the FA Youth Cup-winning team in 2012. But seven years had passed.
The midfielder was named in a large group of players for a pre-season trip to Dublin, but, after a 45-minute run-out against Bohemians in their opening friendly, he was culled, along with Brown and six others who were not part of the first-team plans for the campaign ahead, and urged to go on loan.
As well as interest from several Championship clubs, there were offers two Bundesliga clubs and so, seeing how a move to Germany had worked for young English players such as Jadon Sancho and Reiss Nelson, he held talks with Fortuna Dusseldorf. Enthused by what they told him, he agreed to join on loan, this time with a view to a permanent transfer if all went well.
It didn’t. After a promising Bundesliga debut in a 3-1 victory over Werder Bremen, Baker found himself in a relegation-threatened team who went six games without another win. By mid-October he was dropped as the beleaguered coach, Friedhelm Funkel, chopped and changed in search of a winning formula. He was recalled to the starting line-up in December for a game away to Borussia Dortmund, where Fortuna were overwhelmed 5-0 with only 26 per cent of the possession, and then came off the bench during a 3-0 defeat at home to RB Leipzig a week later. By the time the winter break came, Fortuna were one place off the bottom of the table, Funkel was feeling the heat and Baker had been dropped from the squad altogether.
When the squad reconvened after the winter break, Baker wasn’t there.
“He’s in London and supposedly sick. I can’t check that,” Funkel said. “I don’t know the reason why he isn’t here. What I do know is that Lewis Baker wasn’t in the squad against Union Berlin (the final game before the Christmas break) and should have trained with the others the next morning. All the other players who weren’t part of the (match-day) squad were there. He was not. That has some meaning.”
It also sounds damning. But Lutz Pfannenstiel, Fortuna’s sporting director at the time, viewed it differently. “I’m sure Lewis would say there are some things he could have done things differently,” he tells The Athletic, “but he didn’t behave badly or show a bad attitude. I think it came down to a breakdown in communication between the player and the coach.”
The loan was terminated by mutual agreement, but Pfannenstiel felt a reluctance in doing so. “It was a shame it didn’t work out, because he’s a good guy and such a talented player,” he says. “He was probably our best player in his debut, and things looked really good. Not long after he left, we changed coach and I honestly feel that Lewis would have fitted in perfectly under (Funkel’s successor) Uwe Rosler in terms of both communication and playing style. If he had stayed, maybe he would have helped us stay up. ”
Baker returned to Chelsea, a first extended spell with his parent club since he went on loan to Sheffield Wednesday with such high hopes five years earlier. And as he remained on the margins, witnessing how keen Lampard and assistant Jody Morris were to integrate young players such as Mount and Gilmour into the first-team squad, he must have contemplated how he might have benefited from such an approach when he was at the same age.
There was a rare sighting of Baker when Chelsea played a pre-season friendly away to Brighton in August, but he desperately needed a move and jumped at the opportunity to move to Turkey and team up with Eddie Newton at Trabzonspor.
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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 18:13:26 GMT
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Post by andystokey on Jan 11, 2022 18:17:45 GMT
That can’t be his real name! I went to school with his brother Roger.
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Post by FullerMagic on Jan 11, 2022 18:18:13 GMT
He's playing for Chelsea u23s against Arsenal in the Autoglass thing tonight
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Post by prestwichpotter on Jan 11, 2022 18:23:44 GMT
In our current FFP predicament he'd be just about perfect......
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Post by bayernoatcake on Jan 11, 2022 18:33:03 GMT
Bit of a gamble but the youtube video is good. And not good in the usual flashy bollocks way. He covers his full back and tracks a runner, we don't have a midfielder that can do that.
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Post by theonlooker on Jan 11, 2022 18:41:33 GMT
JUST ******G SIGN HIM.
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Post by RF10 on Jan 11, 2022 18:47:35 GMT
He seems to have a lot of spells where he is rated highly but then nothing really happens. Doesn't seem to have any kind of stability which can't have helped his progress.
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Post by bolders on Jan 11, 2022 18:48:22 GMT
Are these talented players being ruined by the ‘Made in Chelsea’ project, constantly sending them here there and everywhere and not really settling and just getting on with it?
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Post by thehartshillbadger on Jan 11, 2022 18:48:23 GMT
He seems to have a lot of spells where he is rated highly but then nothing really happens. Doesn't seem to have any kind of stability which can't have helped his progress. Perhaps he’s a piss head
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Post by andystokey on Jan 11, 2022 18:50:05 GMT
Bit of a gamble but the youtube video is good. And not good in the usual flashy bollocks way. He covers his full back and tracks a runner, we don't have a midfielder that can do that. I'm willing to take almost any gamble to have a proper CDM in the squad. It was gross negligence to consider starting any EFL season without one.
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Post by dirtygary69 on Jan 11, 2022 18:53:48 GMT
That can’t be his real name! Someone stole his anus.
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Post by thehartshillbadger on Jan 11, 2022 18:54:55 GMT
That can’t be his real name! Someone stole his anus. Nice euphemism
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Post by bayernoatcake on Jan 11, 2022 19:26:17 GMT
Bit of a gamble but the youtube video is good. And not good in the usual flashy bollocks way. He covers his full back and tracks a runner, we don't have a midfielder that can do that. I'm willing to take almost any gamble to have a proper CDM in the squad. It was gross negligence to consider starting any EFL season without one. If he can play like the video for us, he'll be ideal.
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Post by somersetstokie on Jan 11, 2022 19:31:43 GMT
Lewis Baker:
The homegrown star, who made his first appearance for Chelsea in eight years at the weekend against Chesterfield in the FA Cup, is happy to wait until his contract expires in west London.
"Having played in the Netherlands, Turkey and Germany on loan, he hopes for a long-term contract in the English game next season at an upwardly mobile Championship club."
Of course he does, and who is his first thought as a place to comfortably sit out his new long term contract. Stoke city registered charity.
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Post by Rick Grimes on Jan 11, 2022 19:37:23 GMT
We’re crying out for a decent midfielder and given our current financial restrictions Baker would be a decent signing.
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Post by GeneralFaye on Jan 11, 2022 19:38:36 GMT
Never been overly impressed by him but I guess I'd take him on a free.
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