Diabolical or Smart

Chelsea: In Torres We Trust

Anuvrat — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:21:20 +0000

It’s been an year since Torres joined us and even he would agree that it has not been a rosy 12 months experience. He has struggled for goals. And just when we thought he was getting back to his best, he got himself red carded and sidelined for a whole month. Torres has failed to live up to his standards set at Liverpool. His first goal for us is something I always go back to. I remember that night. I was jumping up and down with madness. I was watching the game live on TV and could hear the 40K crowd of Stamford Bridge go “Torres Torres!!”. Even the heavy rain could not dampen their spirits.

Twelve months in and even today the Chelsea fans are fully supportive of our number 9. There are flashes of his brilliance. On his day he torments the defenders – doesn’t score is a different matter as he compensates it by creating lots of chances for others. But then the very next match he once again becomes that lonely man roaming around without any purpose.

I’d like the Chelsea fans to disagree but I feel that our midfield is partly responsible for Torres’s extended goal drought. With Lampard aging, Essien injured we do not have any good player to play the through ball to Torres. A striker feeds off his midfielders. Torres does not have anyone feeding him those balls on a regular basis.

I was watching the Arsenal vs Blackburn game tonight. Arsenal demolished the Rovers 7-1. Do you know how those goals were scored? Walcott received the ball at the edge of the penalty box and he played a wonderful cross to Van Persie who was right in front of the goal. All Persie had to do was to tap the ball in. Sadly for Torres though Sturridge is way too selfish to play him such crosses. On the right we have Ashley Cole who these days just lofts his final ball into the air and hopes someone from Chelsea will head it in. The third goal that Chamberlain scored today was because of an incisive pass by Persie right at the edge of the box. When Torres provides such passes to Ramires or Mata, they just flash their shot wide. No quality finishing.

The lack of ability to finish or create forces Torres to run deeper into the midfield and receive the ball himself. That is something you’ve seen Rooney do last year. The lack of service forces your striker to become a midfielder. And yet you expect goals from him!

I think the manner in which Chelsea play their 4-3-3 doesn’t suit Torres. Chelsea takes the easier option of running down the flanks – supported by Cole and who ever is right back for that game – and then loft the ball into the penalty box for your striker to score. This worked with Drogba because he was that strong bullish presence in the center who could brush aside his markers. With Torres the same does not work. With Torres you need to pass him the ball along the ground through the midfield. And this is exactly why I think a change in formation might just help Torres.

If Chelsea were to go into a 4-4-2 formation with Torres and Sturridge as the two central strikers and Mata playing just behind them, then I think our strikers will have better chances of conversion. Sturridge likes to come inside into a more central position and this formation will help him. For Torres having Mata in the attacking midfield position will help as Mata can provide those passes Torres used to get off Gerrard.

The 4-4-2 system logically should have been the preferred one. I don’t know why AVB still insists with the 4-3-3 when it’s clearly not working for your strikers. I so want Torres to succeed. I will him to score every time he walks onto the field. If Torres were to spend the next 6 months just as hopelessly as the last 12 Roman might not be so forgiving. It’s Abramovich’s unpredictability that freaks me out sometimes. I so want Torres to come good.

PS: I started following Chelsea only after the Shevchenko era. I do not know if there were people just like me then willing him to score every time he came on. That story ended badly. I do not want a repeat of the same with Torres.

Rumour: Jose To Chelsea?

Anuvrat — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:12:04 +0000

I know this will never happen mostly for two reasons – the breakdown in relationship between Jose and Roman was regarding the power of control of the club that Roman will never agree to compromise and also because I can’t see Chelsea wasting another 20-30 millions firing AVB. But if it were to happen it would make every Chelsea fan around the world happy.

Jose Mourinho brings with himself a guarantee of trophies that no other manager can. He guided us to first Premiere League trophy after like what 50 years of drought? He has the experience and the technical know-how to put in order our messed up team. He can be that ruthless person to make tough decisions and not care about what people say. AVB, who is much too younger, has tried and failed at the same. To control the egoist dressing room of Chelsea you need a man like Jose.

Now seems like the right time to bring Jose back to Chelsea. Earlier Jose had been too defensive. When at Chelsea his success was built upon a miserly defensive team playing counter-attacking football. He carried over the same philosophy at Inter Milan. Remember the Champions League match against Barcelona. Inter sat back in their last 1/3rd and just defended with their lives – only trying to score at the break. That is why I was not much in favor of getting Jose back to our club. I wanted our team to play with flair and to barrage the opposite end with lots of shots on target. That is something Chelsea does not do.

These two years at Real Madrid has seen a change in Jose’s style. He still cares a lot about the defense – against Barcelona, Real Madrid play like his Chelsea and Inter Milan used to play – but he has also opened up to an attacking style of football. It helps that he has players like Ozil and Ronaldo to make the most of the chances. Look at Real Madrid now. They have won a number of games with 2+ margin. Any manager would be happy with such a record.

However, one must look at all the aspects. Jose needs a team of his liking. If he were to come to Chelsea, he will undoubtedly make lots of changes. With the UEFA’s financial fair play coming into picture it seems highly unlikely that Chelsea is again going to splash lots of money in the transfer market. The philosophy of buying lots of young players point to the same – we would rather have lots of Sturridge like cases rather than Torres. Given the current team, without much tinkering, does Jose have in himself to deliver the Premier League again in his first year? I think not.

Also firing AVB would be senseless. We spent like 15 millions in the summer signing him from Porto. It would be just a waste of money firing him after an year. The guy has potential. He must be given time to create a team to his liking. Unlike his predecessors AVB was not handed a treasure chest to go and hand pick any player in the world. Belief and stability is something Chelsea managers need at this transition period. I’m pretty sure that we’ll finish among the top 4. AVB deserves to continue after that.

Lastly, I think Jose would never come back to Chelsea so long as we have Roman. Jose needs complete control over the club – he had that at Inter and Madrid. At Chelsea he’s never going to get that. Just the last week AVB let it known that the signing of Kevin de Bruyne was club policy and not his decision – read, Roman wanted that deal and not the manager. Roman strikes to me as a dictator kind of a person. It’s good that he loves and cares so much for Chelsea and that love will never let him part his veto power. He’ll always continue to influence the club.

And if Jose really wants to get back in England, he’ll find plenty of opportunities. SAF is getting old. Perhaps Manchester United decide to offer Jose the chance to manage the club where he’ll have complete control just like SAF has. If Manchester City fail to win the Premiere League this year Mancini is almost sure to get fired. City can offer Jose a huge salary and also lots of money to attract players. Arsene Wenger could get booted out in favor of Jose – seems highly unlikely though. With English national team place opening up and Redknapp as the most-probable successor, Spurs could be a destination. But with their wage structure and limited funding it might not be the ideal club for Jose. Liverpool? King Kenny fans will be very upset and the move will surely backfire.

When you just sit back to think about it, and knowing Jose, it could just be that he’s trying to stir up the nest and trouble a few people and nothing more. There’s very little reason why he might leave Real Madrid. He has built an amazing team over there who have not yet managed to win the Champions League. And even if he leaves the two Manchester clubs seem like the more likely destination. I would not even give 5% credibility to the rumors of Jose coming back to Chelsea. It’s just that improbable.

Ted Talks : Alain de Botton – Atheism 2.0

Anuvrat — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:31:53 +0000

The biggest issue have with religion is their fanatism. When you come to Science to understand your problem, Science tells you various theories and gives you the option of choice. With religion it’s not the same. An authoritative body drafts few rules it believes is in the best interest of people and then enforces it upon it’s followers. That’s what dictators do – take away the freedom of choice and enforce your will. I hate that.

Another is the existence of God. I think people make up the concept of God just for psychological reasons. But thats a weekness then.

Otherwise, even though I am an Atheist, I am not averse to picking up anything good from religion. Every system has some good elements – otherwise it wouldn’t have survived so long. One can always try to crete a better system by learning from the existing ones.

Recursively Remove .svn Folders

Anuvrat — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:30:33 +0000

I was moving my svn projects to git repository. I needed to get rid of all the .svn folders recursively. Following is the script that I used:

Why I Get So Excited About Chelsea’s Future

Anuvrat — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:34:17 +0000

If you have been following the Chelsea First team then you would have become frustrated with lack of quality that we display on match days. There are days when we can beat an in-form Manchester City, and then there are days when we have to toil and sweat against an easy Fulham. Lack of consistency is killing our campaign. We no longer have faith in our players. Some might say it’s just downhill from here to a team that won the Double just 2 years ago. But I argue otherwise.

Let me start from Jose Mourinho. If you were to trace his football career you’ll observe a trend. He came to Chelsea, a young exciting coach. He was given complete freedom to shape his team. He put his faith in the bullish Drogba, defensively solid Terry, the Bison Essien, the reliable Frank and the amazing Cech. He moulded these players in the 4-3-3 formation. They learnt to defend in his reign. Even today, when Chelsea decide to sit back and defend it’s very tough for opponents to score against us. Terry and Cech are just too damn good in that.

But along the years as these people aged no one was drafted in to replace them. Mourinho builds a short-term result focused team as evident by Inter Milan’s decline after Jose parted ways with them (it’s only at Real Madrid that he’s had the courage to alter his philosophy a little and build a younger team). Managers one after another were brought in at Chelsea to try and do what Jose did but none succeeded. None really had the courage to alter the core of the team and none could extract the same performances that Jose did. Decline was a natural result. Although Ancelotti managed to win the Double, it was more like the star burning at its brightest before the death. Since then we have really struggled. Our strength has turned into weakness and people call us The Pensioners.

For the first time in years has Roman decided to finally change the team. Drafting Jose Mourinho’s protege Andre Villas-Boas was a big gamble. The move was a declaration of a new era – one where a new core team would be found to help Chelsea be more successful. Also there has been a shift in the buying policy. People at the club are trying to bring in players from the youth team. And this is exactly what pleases and excites me.

Josh McEachren is the first name that springs up. He’s an emerging talent that’ll eventually replace Frank Lampard in the English team. Everyone believes that Wilshere and McEachren will become the next Gerrard and Lampard couple. Josh has been sent out on loan to Swansea where I expect him to discover his true potential and come back just as strong as Sturridge did after his spell at Bolton. Realistically speaking, with lots of players leaving Chelsea this summer, I expect Josh to become a regular first team player the next season.

Another talent that we have bought this summer is Romelu Lukaku. He’s an ardent Chelsea fan whose role model is Drogba. With Drogba set to leave us this summer I am certain Lukaku will start lot more matches the next season. If he’s half as good as Fifa 2012 makes him he’ll be amazing to watch. Mind you the only direct competition he’s got is a misfiring Torres and a developing Sturridge. In Lukaku we have a striker who has already set the Belgian league on fire. Sturridge might find it tough to hold out against this guy a couple of years down the line.

Josh and Lukaku are almost certainties to feature in the first team next season. Apart from them I also value Lucas Piazon highly. I have only read about him and seen youtube clips. I hold this guy in high regards. Being a typical tricky-dribbler Brazilian he’ll add a hint of class that has been missing from Chelsea recently. But at only 18 he needs to develop a lot to adapt himself to the rigors of Premiere League. He himself admitted that the grounds here are smaller than those in Brazil and thus it becomes difficult to showcase dribbling talent here. He can play on the wing or behind the striker. Mata and Piazon can then in rotation take on different roles which’ll make marking them all the more difficult.

Sam Hutchinson and Ryan Bertrand are the other players who excite me. They are Chelsea academy products and I really hope they make it into the first team sooner than later. We definitely need a cover for Ashley Cole who plays day-in and day-out. Also Terry needs to be phased out slowly and Hutchinson can be that man. Luiz, Cahill starting with Hutchinson as the backup is an ideal solution.

Oh, and not to forget Curtois.

So you see, Chelsea have a lot of amazing talent waiting for the opportunity to express themselves. Instead buying costly people in a fit of panic, we must be a little patient and make the best use of our youngsters. We have a striker, a midfielder, a winger and two defenders waiting to take the Stamford Bridge by storm. We do not really need to buy for these positions. The only position I think we might need to spend will be the right back. we’ve never had a good player in that position.

I am almost certain that the above 6 players will come good for Chelsea. They are the future of Chelsea and will definitely win us a lot of trophies.

JVM : Out Of Memory PermGen

Anuvrat — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:31:30 +0000

Interesting thing I did not know about Java – PermGen. Apparently other than just the stack (local variables and methods) and the heap (everything else), java uses this extra storage which can also cause OOMs.

PermGen is where a few very long-lived types of objects are persisted in Java, such as class definitions and ‘intern’ed Strings. It uses separate storage from the heap and the stack. If you run out of PermGen you will get out of memory errors. If you run very low you will get a JVM that spends all its time garbage collecting.

Few things I came about when I googled around:

Never call System.gc(). It does not know the best time to garbage collect, only the JVM really does. (http://bit.ly/zIfp0B)
Common causes of OOM in PermGen is ClassLoader. Whenever a class is loaded into JVM, all its meta data, along with Classloader, is kept on PermGen are and they will be garbage collected when the Classloader which loaded them is ready for garbage collection. In case Classloader has a memory leak then all classes loaded by it will remain in the memory and cause PermGen OOM once you repeat it a couple of times.
http://blogs.oracle.com/fkieviet/entry/classloader_leaks_the_dreaded_java [definitely read this!]
http://www.integratingstuff.com/2011/07/24/understanding-and-avoiding-the-java-permgen-space-error/ [also this one]

Luckily I’ve never had to deal with PermGen OOM before. Apparently it’s hell-of-a-job debugging this issue.

From The SDE Tip – Amazon

No related posts.

Google Sunsets Urchin

Anuvrat — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:23:27 +0000

Of late Google has been busy trimming the list of products and services it owns. Most of the acquired ones have been integrated into some core Google product and thus makes sense to drop them. For example, Pikniks features have been integrated into Picasa and is thus being shut down in April.

Another such product is Urchin. Having acquired the web analytics company, Google went into overdrive to create the Google Analytic service. Needless to say Google Analytics is way better than Urchin. The modified urchin.js (now called ga.js) does much more – it can track events and client side activities better than urchin.js. Thus the announcement to sunset Urchin. However, this might not be very well received by every one out there.

Google Analytics requires one to feed their logs to Google servers. Yeah you could un-check the tiny box to stress that the data should not be shared with Google, but still a lot of people will be uncomfortable with storing their data on servers not owned by them. With Urchin one had the benefit of locally installing the service. The UTM logs would be collected on boxes owned by the companies and also the log processor would run inside their firewall. Every company needs this sense of security. The moment log collection and parsing are pulled out of a company’s firewall eyebrows are raised. This is the reason why I believe that there will not be many takers for their Google Analytics Premium service. A person who is willing to pay 150000 USD per year have privacy and data security concerns no matter what the contract says.

For quite a while the Urchin software had not been updated. Google could have let the situation be as is. But by announcing that no new licenses will be sold from March onwards, they have challenged everybody – give us the logs or get lost. This kind of goes against their Google Is Not Evil policy. Not a good move in my opinion.

Mac : Create Password Protected Folder

Anuvrat — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:19:14 +0000

The Disk Utility app of Mac allows one to create a password protected folder. An encrypted disk image is created. To mount the disk one has to enter the password set at the time of creation. The steps to create one is very easy.

Open up the Disk Utility app. Goto File -> New -> Blank Disk Image. Enter a name for the image. Choose the location. Disk name will be the name of the mounted image. Set a size that you want. Importantly enable encryption from the drop down. And for the image format drop down, select the Sparse Disk Image option. Click on create.

A new window comes up to set a password. Remember to uncheck the “Remember password in Keychain” option. Set the password and you are done.

Double clicking on the image file will bring up a window to enter the password. Authenticate yourself and you’ll see that the image has been mounted. Add files, remove files, etc and do whatever you want to. Remember to eject the image after your work is done.

There you go. A password protected image is all setup.

Mac : Impressed With The Battery Life

Anuvrat — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:49:09 +0000

It was only a week ago that I switched to Mac from Windows and my 10.7 Lion has already impressed me with its battery life. With battery level down to some 60%, I was able to play audio songs on my iTunes through out the night.

I started iTunes at 11 in the night and queued 132 songs for playing. No more activity. I left the lid as is, switched off the lights and went to bed. I woke up at 5 in the morning and the songs were still playing. Happily I dozed off again. The music had stopped when I next got up at 7:30.

But being able to play music for 6 hours with only 60% battery is an amazing battery performance. Really impressed!

EPL: Wigan Athletic vs Chelsea – Dec 2011 – Post Match

Anuvrat — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:55:34 +0000

Villas Boas

My reaction after the substitutions – WTF is going on in AVB’s mind?

Bringing on Kalou in place of Romeu made technical sense. A 0-0 scoreline against a weaker opponent suggests the introduction of a more attacking player. The choice of player in this case wasn’t something that pleased me though. Whenever I see Kalou, I am reminded of the handball and subsequent penalty given by him to Valencia in the dying moments. This guy doesn’t inspire confidence.

AVB’s next move is more baffling. He brings on Mikel for Mata! Dude. Just 1 up against a team fighting the relegation threat, one must always be on the offensive. Sacrificing your most creative piece for a player who doesn’t deserve a place in any of the top teams makes no sense at all. With this move, Chelsea went into a 4-2-1-3 formation. The only motive at this point was to desperately hang to the lead. And that’s something you do against a better opponent and not Wigan!

The third substitution was absolutely scandalous. Pray tell us the name of the Oracle that told you removing your goal scorer for a lame runner will benefit your side. At this point Wigan were already pouring forward trying to get the equalizer. AVB’s move – let me pick up someone randomly from the field and the bench and swap them. Gosh! That’s terrible.

All this while when Chelsea were in trouble I have defended AVB. But today I am forced to ask what his plans actually were? What was he really expecting his substitutes to accomplish? How can he publicly state that he’ll help Torres find his best form and never give him a chance to play?

I think AVB has totally lost his plot. The pressure’s gotten to him. He has finally bowed down and abolished his attacking principles. The complete 90 minutes Chelsea were playing a purposeless game. There was no real passion or determination to win the game. They just sat back to defend and hoped they get a goal as a gift. It was a drab, dull and boring match. A waste of 90 minutes. Nightmarish. This was just as terrible as the 5-3 drubbing by Arsenal. They could have just bent over and saved themselves the humiliation of almost getting beat by an 18th placed team.

I don’t know what else to say. There was not a single minute in the game when Chelsea looked confident or a title challenger. Easily one of the worst games of the season so far.