Month: February 2020

LONDON — It’s Wednesday July 24. Boris Johnson is settling in to No. 10 Downing Street. And he’s a man in a hurry.

Johnson’s supporters say they are taking “nothing for granted,” but barring a dramatic shift in opinion among the 160,000 Conservative members who will decide the party’s next leader — and the U.K.’s next prime minister — Johnson will take power in little over a fortnight.

With just 100 days between taking office and the U.K.’s scheduled Brexit date of October 31, MP supporters and campaign officials expect the former mayor of London to begin his tenure with a frenzy of activity, at home and abroad.

“It will be an administration that wants to get a lot done quickly,” said one senior MP familiar with Johnson’s intentions. “It hasn’t got a lot of time until October 31. It’s going to want to engage on numerous fronts very fast.”

A transition team consisting of officials and MPs, headed by Johnson’s former chief of staff at City Hall, Edward Lister, has begun planning for the first 100 days. Also involved are former Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, ex-MP James Wharton, former party chair Grant Shapps, Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock, and junior Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden.

According to four people close to Johnson’s campaign they are planning a busy summer. He will seek to renegotiate Theresa May’s deal with Brussels; step up preparations for no deal at home; and launch an “exercise in reassurance” that such an outcome will not be as bad as the worst predictions.

Diplomatic overtures to Washington — and potentially an early meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump — are high on the agenda.

Feel-good strategy

Johnson’s first words to the nation as prime minister could come from the lectern in Downing Street, minutes after being appointed by the Queen in a private meeting at Buckingham Palace. The new PM will be the Queen’s fourteenth — Winston Churchill was in power when she took the throne.

Members of Johnson’s campaign say no one, not even Johnson himself, knows what he will say in his first address to the nation. But his communications strategy in this first summer will be one of seeking to “make the country feel good about itself,” a second MP briefed on the transition team’s approach said.

Johnson will prioritize domestic policies he feels promote a sense of national unity, and he is particularly interested in rolling out full-fiber broadband to the entire country by 2025. The idea enthuses him, the second MP said, because it is “about uniting the country and giving everyone the same advantages there are in London.”

Negotiate early

While May’s first summer in charge, in 2016, involved a whistle-stop tour of EU capitals (she visited Berlin, Paris, Rome, Bratislava and Warsaw within her first two weeks), officials and MPs on Johnson’s campaign talk down the prospect of their man taking a similar approach.

The candidate himself told the Spectator magazine (the publication he used to edit) in an interview this week that he intends to be “carrying out negotiations throughout August and September,” implying he will make a beeline for the U.K.’s negotiating partner, the European Commission. May did not launch formal negotiations until a year after she took power. Johnson simply doesn’t have time for that.

Whether the EU, whose leaders have said repeatedly that the Withdrawal Agreement is not up for renegotiation, will engage remains to be seen. Brussels also traditionally empties of Commission officials in August, so he may find no one to conduct negotiations with.

The nominee for Commission president, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, will not formally take over the reins (assuming she is confirmed by MEPs) until after the U.K.’s official leave date. But Johnson’s team will be hoping she begins exerting her influence earlier than that because of her existing contact with Gavin Williamson, a senior figure in the Johnson camp. He has remained in touch with her since his time as U.K. defense minister.

“She is an amazing individual with a real passion and understanding of her brief who was a real joy to work with. I always felt she had a strong understanding of what the U.K. delivered for European defense and security,” Williamson told POLITICO.

Von der Leyen will not take charge until November though, and has given no indication she will push, even then, for a revision of the Commission’s stance that the Withdrawal Agreement is closed.

Be prepared

Key to persuading the EU to think again, the Johnson camp say, will be a very visible ramping up of preparations for a no-deal exit on October 31 to prove the U.K. is serious. Delay in preparation, the former foreign secretary told the Spectator, “robs the U.K. of conviction during the negotiations.”

Johnson’s leadership rival Jeremy Hunt, who has laid out his approach to Brexit in detail, has talked about setting up a no-deal task force similar to the U.K government’s emergency “Cabinet Office Briefing Room” (COBRA) meetings. Team Johnson are considering making a similar public show of stepping up preparations, and have also been told by ministers working on existing plans that individuals and businesses will need to be alerted to step up their own preparations.

But alongside this approach, they are planning what the second MP described as a “big exercise in reassurance to the public.” Johnson wants ordinary people to not only feel like the country is ready for no deal, but that the outcome won’t be that bad.

“We don’t want it to feel like an embattled island,” the MP said.

The team may highlight the opportunities a no-deal Brexit can afford via “heavy engagement” with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from day one, the second MP said, in pursuit of a post-Brexit U.K.-U.S. free-trade agreement.

The first MP concurred: “Opportunities do present themselves because there will be a very different Washington-London relationship.”

Johnson, who Trump says he likes (the president spoke to him on the phone during his recent state visit), knows that a trade deal with the U.S. would not come without significant sacrifices. Washington has made no secret of its determination to unlock the U.K. market for American farmers, something their British counterparts dread.

But an early photo opportunity with Trump, potentially in Washington, would contribute to Johnson’s plan to persuade the EU he is serious about Britain making a clean break.

Parliamentary roadblocks

The elephant in the room for Johnson during this first summer will be parliament.

It has never found a majority in favor of leaving the EU with no deal, as Johnson vows to do if he cannot persuade the EU to renegotiate the Northern Ireland backstop. That arithmetic will not change without a general election.

The key figures in the resistance to Johnson could be Conservative soft Brexit rebels led by potential Cabinet casualties of Johnson’s first reshuffle. Those are likely to include Chancellor Philip Hammond, Justice Secretary David Gauke, Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington and International Development Secretary Rory Stewart.

The opposition Labour party may well test their resolve on Thursday July 25, the day after the new prime minister takes office, by calling a vote of confidence in the government, but even they do not expect success at this stage. “The real fight will be in the autumn,” said one senior Labour official.

If Johnson loses that fight, the most likely outcome is a general election.

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This article is part of POLITICO’s MEP Survival Guide, an introduction to the Brussels bubble and the European Parliament.

Just because the European Parliament is kicking off a new term doesn’t mean it starts with a clean slate. Plenty of thorny, unresolved or new policy issues will find their way onto the plenary agenda — or might even land straight on your desk.

Here’s a brief on nine files you can expect to get familiar with fast over the next few months.

Holding internet platforms responsible

One of the looming challenges of the next five years is one of the biggest puzzles regarding the future of the internet: How do you regulate platforms like Facebook and Google to prevent wrongdoing but without killing the digital engine powering the modern economy?

Under current rules, internet companies are not liable for illegal content hosted on their platforms, including terrorist propaganda and hate speech. They are required to remove flagged illegal content but do not have to actively monitor what’s posted by users. Some platforms have started to actively monitor for things like ISIS videos. A few also scan for nudity, racist comments or other harmful content.

The law at the center of the debate, the EU’s e-Commerce Directive, was first adopted in 2000 and hasn’t been updated since. Tech giants argue that the liability exemption it contains, along with a similar measure in the U.S. Communications Decency Act, is a cornerstone of the internet economy that turned them into some of the world’s largest, richest companies.

But the mood is changing and now the tech industry is gearing up to become part of the conversation when the European Commission, Council and Parliament reassess the liability regime.

Regulating truckers

Good luck cleaning up the mess left by the last Parliament on the controversial reforms to the haulage market. In the last mandate, lawmakers agreed their position on new EU rules governing how truckers can roam the bloc, including specifications on driving times, how many drop-offs they should be allowed to do in a foreign country and when local labor rules should apply to an inherently mobile workforce.

It might sound like a relatively mundane clutch of EU regulations, but the issue has split the bloc along rich and poor lines. French President Emmanuel Macron has been a vocal supporter of tougher rules for the sector in order to protect the Western European workforce from an influx of cheaper labor. But Central Europeans fear his alliance with Germany and Austria will shut their workers out of Europe’s single market and that the European Commission has taken Paris’ side.

Here’s where the new Parliament comes in. After a fractious debate, rejected votes and much hand-wringing in the final months of the last mandate, a first reading was passed in plenary. But MEPs didn’t sign off on the mandate to start interinstitutional negotiations, meaning more votes will have to take place before talks on a final set of laws can start with the Council.

Reforming gas rules

The upcoming energy agenda will be all about gas. Now that EU policymakers have agreed to reform the bloc’s electricity markets to accommodate more renewables and better connect power grids, the Commission is due to come out with proposals aimed at reforming gas markets, including by promoting what the industry calls “green” gas, such as hydrogen and synthetic fuels. Parliament will soon be called upon to weigh in with amendments.

Showering the planet with (green) gold

The new crop of MEPs will be hearing a lot about “sustainable finance” — the EU bubble’s latest buzz word. The Commission wants to foster sustainable investment, while making sure that label is not used to “greenwash” investment in polluting businesses.

Figuring out what counts as a green investment will be crucial to harnessing the mix of government and private money needed to revamp the world’s energy, transport and farming sectors in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Whichever bloc sets the rules will also secure an immense advantage for its domestic financial industry, which is why Brussels is keen to set global standards.

An EU expert group has been assessing economic sectors to determine which activities classify as environmentally sustainable for investment purposes across the bloc. The next Commission will now consult on the suggested sustainable investment screening criteria, which will be the basis of any further legislation on sustainable finance.

Overhauling agriculture policy (at last)

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest single item on the EU budget, making its reform not just the mother of all files for Europe’s agriculture policy but one of the most highly politicized bits of the bloc’s policymaking.

The CAP reform aims at better targeting farm subsidies and making more of the money contingent on environmental protection. The bill is divided into three separate pieces of legislation.

EU institutions did not begin negotiating a deal before the European election despite a push from Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan. The Commission now needs to decide whether to move forward with Hogan’s plan or to withdraw the proposal and put forward a new vision for the CAP.

In Parliament, the agriculture committee managed to vote on a draft position, but ran out of time to bring the file to plenary for approval, which would have cemented it as the institutions’ position for negotiations with the Commission and Council. That leaves the newly seated agriculture committee free to restart the process.

Hammering out the EU budget

The new Parliament will have to negotiate with the Council of the EU on a myriad of regulations relating to the 2021-2027 EU budget. Parliament doesn’t have a formal right to negotiate over the big decisive questions of the budget, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a role to play. Once EU leaders reach unanimous agreement on the broad outlines of the next budget, Parliament has the power to vote it down, sending it back to the Council for another try.

The tussle over the budget is entangled with the CAP reform, since the budget negotiations will determine how much money is available for agricultural programs. The Commission has proposed a 5 percent overall drop in spending on agriculture, but experts have objected that a careful assessment of the Commission’s plan shows the real cuts would amount to closer to 15 percent.

Fighting hackers

Europe is waking up to the vulnerabilities and risks that come with a globally integrated and complex information technology sector. Leading cybersecurity companies and Western intelligence agencies have warned that hackers — often state-backed — have infiltrated Europe’s industrial, economic and infrastructure companies for years, as part of industrial espionage campaigns. It’s the kind of thing that keeps executives in Germany’s industrial heartland up at night.

Cybersecurity lawmakers in the next Commission are likely to zoom in further on the issue of “supply chain security.” The outgoing Commission turned hawkish on some of the core questions around the digital security of Europe’s industries. It has pushed capitals to set up stricter security reviews for 5G infrastructure, in light of concerns about Chinese telecom vendors like Huawei. Meanwhile, it is drafting briefing books for its successor on how to decrease the dependency of European technology on foreign supply chain companies.

New MEPs will be faced with politically hypersensitive questions around global trade, trust and security, as the Commission presents its plans to counter these threats.

Taking on the EU’s ‘systemic rival’

Forced technology transfers, reciprocity in public procurement, industrial subsidies: The next Commission will have to secure EU unity in the face of rising Chinese influence. The bloc designated Beijing as a “strategic rival;” now it’ll have to take action.

Backlash from Paris and Berlin from the Commission’s decision to block the Alstom-Siemens rail mega-merger means Brussels will have to follow up on a Franco-German push for a European industrial strategy. That includes mulling whether the bloc should allow for the creation of so-called European champions that can take on Asian rivals, even if it means rewriting its competition rulebook.

A top priority will also be to press China to engage more in World Trade Organization reforms, according to the director general of the Commission’s trade department, Jean-Luc Demarty. “If there is no reform to the WTO system, in particular on the rulebook and subsidies, the WTO system will be no longer relevant,” he warned.

Ensuring that countries like China open up domestic tenders to EU bidders — also known as reciprocity in public procurement — will also be high on the agenda. The EU can be expected to move quickly to block access to its markets to countries that keep their doors closed. This will be Brussels’ third try to get national governments to agree on a common position, but the Commission thinks this time the winds have turned in its favor. A new, revised proposal can be expected to land on MEPs’ desk.

Tackling drug pricing

While drugs can be approved at the EU level, negotiations about whether and how much to pay are up to each member country. The Commission has been pushing for more cooperation on assessing new drugs, but has run into a wall in the Council of the EU representing member countries.

Health technology assessment is the process of evaluating how much a drug is worth — a decision that brings science, politics and ethics into play, given scarce health system resources. The Commission is proposing cooperation on just the first stage of HTA, the scientific assessment of how a new drug performs compared with the existing treatment. That would avoid having to repeat the process in each country; many smaller countries also say they just don’t have the expertise or resources to do this themselves.

To ensure there’s no duplication of efforts, the Commission has proposed making use of the jointly produced scientific report mandatory in a country’s broader HTA deliberations, and the Parliament backed this approach by a wide margin.

The file is now stuck in the Council. A blocking minority of countries — led by Germany and France — say requiring countries to use the joint report infringes on a national prerogative and that a voluntary collaboration would be better. All eyes are on Berlin to break the impasse, and negotiations may continue until the German Council presidency in late 2020.

Europe’s highest court is not satisfied with a pre-ticked box.

On Tuesday, judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that websites must obtain explicit consent from users in order to collect their personal data.

In their decision, the judges ruled it is not enough to flash a pre-ticked box in front of people to have them consent for their digital information to be collected. Instead, websites must ask users to actively opt in to sharing their data.

The ruling from the Luxembourg-based court dealt a blow to search engines, social media platforms and other websites that rely heavily on such boxes to obtain consent with minimal input from people across the 28-country bloc.

By prompting users to make a proactive choice, the ruling may lead people to deny consent and potentially deprive websites of personal data that is now the lifeblood of the digital economy.

The ruling is the latest from Europe’s highest court that aims to rein in tech companies’ activities. On Thursday, the same judges will rule if Facebook should be held responsible for removing defamatory content from its global platform or merely from the country where the complaint was filed.

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The ruling also marks a victory for privacy campaigners who have pushed back against the use of so-called cookies, or technology that allows firms to collect information on people’s digital activities.

Case born in Germany

The ruling, which will apply across the European Union, originated in Germany where a group of consumer organizations filed a lawsuit against Planet 49, a local website that hosted an online lottery.

To participate in the sweepstake, users needed to check two boxes, one of which had been pre-checked to allow the use of cookies. To revoke consent, the user needed to actively uncheck the box.

That was incompatible with Europe’s tough privacy standards, the German consumer advocates argued.

On Tuesday, the CJEU sided with them, fueling a debate over how much say people should have over how their data is collected, and exactly how consent should be granted.

“The court decides that the consent which a website user must give to the storage of and access to cookies on his or her equipment is not validly constituted by way of a pre-checked checkbox which that user must deselect to refuse his or her consent,” the judges wrote in a statement.

As a new European Commission prepares to take office November 1, consumer protection groups and Silicon Valley companies are ramping up lobbying around several planned pieces of legislation — including the so-called ePrivacy Regulation, which aims to set privacy rules for online communications — that will affect how digital information is collected and managed.

The court’s ruling “spells it out for the industry and calls for clear rules on confidentiality of our communications,” said Diego Naranjo, head of policy at EDRi, a consumer rights group. “EU member states need to finally move forward with legislating this practice, and take the much-needed ePrivacy Regulation out of the EU Council’s closet.”

The ePrivacy Rgulation has been stuck in negotiations between national interests at the Council of the European Union.

“The ruling is an important sign for the protection of digital privacy,” Heiko Dünkel, the German consumer organizations’ legal officer, said in a statement. “Tracking cookies enable website operators and third-party providers to make a comprehensive evaluation of the surfing and usage behavior of customers.”

A representative for Planet 49 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In its ruling, the Luxembourg-based court also said that selecting a button to participate in a lottery was not sufficient to be considered valid consent. Instead, websites must give users sufficient information on what will be done with their collected data and what steps they can take to limit it.

“The information that the service provider must give to a user includes the duration of the operation of cookies and whether or not third parties may have access to those cookies,” the judges concluded.

While the ruling represents a win for privacy campaigners, it not clear how it will be enforced or whether it will lead to an increase in so-called pop-ups prompting users for consent to have their data gathered. Europe’s existing rules — known as the cookie directive — were criticized for bombarding users with such pop-ups, which many people agree to without reading the fine print.

Under the EU’s new data protection rules, which came into force in May 2018, companies faced a new obligation to detail what information they were collecting and what other firms would be given access to the information.

But several lawsuits, including one from Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems, argue that websites are bypassing those obligations, notably by making access to online services such as Google and Facebook conditional on providing consent for data gathering. Both companies deny any wrongdoing.

Rulings on Schrems’ complaints are expected to be published next year.

Tuesday’s judgment “indicates a direction in how the laws are moving,” said Luca Tosoni, a privacy researcher at the University of Oslo. “The degree of autonomy that is given to people over how they are able to give their consent is rather big.”

If 2019 was the year that climate finance went mainstream, 2020 promises to finally give nature a seat at the green finance table.

Massive biodiversity loss was flagged as one of the top five global threats at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, where businesses were called upon to start disclosing nature-related risks. Meanwhile investors such as BNP Paribas and AXA are now moving ‘beyond carbon’ to assess firms’ biodiversity impacts. And cognizant of the real economic threats of ecosystem destruction and degradation, central bankers and regulators around the world are working on a nature-focused expansion to the influential Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) framework.

Given the usual focus on climate mitigation, it is encouraging to see the financial industry acknowledge the intersectionality of our ecological crisis. With the current rate of plant and animal species extinction up to 100 times greater than the average over the past 10 million years, biodiversity both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the climate emergency. Healthy, functioning ecosystems are the foundation of the biosphere upon which all of life depends. But initiatives to restore biodiversity face serious funding challenges. A report by McKinsey found that conservation projects need up to $400 billion a year yet receive only $52 billion, most of which comes from philanthropic and public funding.

Mainstream green finance initiatives conceptualise such environmental funding gaps as example of market failures. Nature- and climate-related risks are perceived as under-priced in financial markets, resulting in negative externalities borne by society and the natural world. Disclosures of better environmental information are considered to be the optimal solution to ‘fix’ the market for investments and hence optimise capital allocation. There have been valid criticisms of relying solely on market mechanisms to resolve the climate emergency. But biodiversity, too, is a complex and thorny issue to shoehorn into a market-based financial framework. The inherently political and ethics-riddled reality of conservation raises serious questions about privileging private finance as a dominant actor, and also reveals the problems inherent in an information-based approach to resolving the ecological crisis.

Natural capital approaches, which assign monetary valuations to the resources and services provided by nature, are market-based frameworks aiming to tackle biodiversity loss. Applying the logic of financialisation to nature is a controversial notion. As critics have pointed out, simplifying complex economic phenomena to monetary valuations embeds a false equivalence between natural and manmade ‘capital’, and also implies that habitat restoration in one place can fully offset destruction in another. Moreover, natural capital approaches rely on the notion of ‘efficient markets’ as the main mechanism for action. Not only is this problematic in that markets are designed to optimise for profit, usually in the short term, but financial models are poorly suited to capturing the non-linear tipping points, feedback loops, and systemic connections that characterise ecology. Financialisation also effectively removes the rights of nature to exist on its own terms. An asset must generate returns, after all.

This last point reveals an uncomfortable truth for the green finance world. Unlike low-carbon infrastructure investments, many biodiversity-related projects may not yield returns that are monetisable in the conventional sense. Wetlands restoration, for example, can deliver significant economic benefits – flood defences, carbon sequestration, rich wildlife habitats – but these are not easily translated into an income stream. Even where the rewards are tangible, conservation is a tricky sell for private investors. High transaction costs and returns that may take decades to materialise make for an unappealing risk-return profile. And the necessarily small and localised nature of many projects render them difficult and costly to incorporate into large-scale investment vehicles such as green bonds.

But the extension of markets into nature has also had darker, human consequences that are rarely acknowledged in green finance circles. There is mounting evidence that market-based environmental schemes such as the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) have fuelled violent land grabs in the Global South, where thousands of indigenous peoples have been forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands as Western companies privatise vast swathes of forest for conservation. Markets require private property regimes to function. But the imposition of such regimes is often incompatible with communities whose cultures and means for prosperity are embedded within surrounding ecosystems.

It is hard to see such a trend as anything other than environmental colonialism. The notion that humans must be separated from land for nature to restore itself is a highly Westernized understanding of conservation. It has also repeatedly been demonstrated to be wrong.

A huge body of research led by Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom has shown that communities around the world have developed their own commons governance systems to sustainably manage natural resources for the long term. Instead of the top-down data-oriented methods often advocated by green finance, such approaches utilise a sophisticated combination of local knowledge, community rules, and adaptive management to steward complex ecosystems beyond the market sphere. Requiring the input and cooperation of the whole community to function, commons-based systems are necessarily inclusive and participatory political institutions.

The complex political ecology of conservation reveals the limitations and potential dangers of letting private sector initiatives dominate solutions to the biodiversity crisis. It is time to acknowledge that many aspects of nature are public goods or part of the commons and would be better served by a multi-stakeholder approach to mobilizing finance.

The public sector is not only a source of patient, long-term capital, but can also embed democratic, participatory processes to foster localised commons governance. Moreover, as economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued, incorporating ecological concerns into mission-oriented public policy establishes long-term certainty in the policy landscape and can ‘crowd in’ and direct private investment to the right ends. Instead of fixating upon information availability and prediction as a precursor to action, as market-fixing approaches do, effective public policy should focus on building ecosystem resilience and avoiding irreversible tipping points. For, as the precautionary principle states, informational uncertainty is no excuse for delaying urgent action when the consequences of ecosystem collapse would be catastrophic.

Overall, the biodiversity crisis reveals some uncomfortable truths for the world of green finance. Financial disclosures and metrics are not only ill-suited to capturing ecological phenomena, but they cast a veneer of neutrality over what are politically and ideologically charged issues, excluding those who have a right to be part of the decision-making process. This year’s World Economic Forum called for a move to stakeholder capitalism. Ahead of the UN’s COP15 Biodiversity Conference in China later this year, it is time for policymakers and green finance players to step up to the challenge of building inclusive, multi-stakeholder approaches to resolve the biodiversity crisis.

The solutions to restore our ecosystems cannot be confined to the market sphere.

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One of the most intriguing fixtures sees Tottenham welcome the German side, RB Leipzig, to London in a match that pits Jose Mourinho against one of the most progressive and forward-thinking coaches in top-level football, Julian Nagelsmann.

This match gives us an interesting contrast in styles with Mourinho now favouring a safety-first approach while Nagelsmann is very much an attack-minded coach. 

But what can Spurs expect to see tactically from the German side. This in itself is a challenge given the capacity of the Bundesliga team to change tactical structure several times over the course of a single game.

Statistical Analysis

First of all, we should look at the statistical profile of RB Leipzig so far this season.

Looking at the output of a team over the course of the season so far can be helpful in informing our expectations when we take a deeper look at the tactical profile of the team.

At the time of writing, albeit with Bayern Munich still to play, RB Leipzig sit on top of the Bundesliga having won their most recent match 3-0 at home to Werder Bremen.

In terms of their attacking output they have scored 56 goals this season so far, the third-highest behind only Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich. Their xG over the season, however, is sitting at 48.95 which is the highest in the Bundesliga.

Defensively RB Leipzig have conceded 25 goals which is again the third-best in the Bundesliga behind only Bayern Munich and Borussia Monchengladbach. Their xGA is 25.45 which is again third-best in the league behind just Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund.

They are averaging 14.45 shots per game while conceding just 8.87 per 90 minutes. In other words, the German side are a dangerous attacking side who are also strong at the back.

This is according to angry Blues supporter Sam, who phoned talkSPORT to rant about the boss ‘getting away with murder’ at Stamford Bridge.

Monday’s loss means Chelsea are now only safe in the top four by a single point, having appeared comfortable just weeks ago.

Spurs are the Blues’ closest challengers ahead of their visit to the Bridge on Saturday afternoon – with full commentary of the London derby LIVE on talkSPORT as part of GameDay!

Sheffield United are then a further point behind in sixth with Man United themselves another point behind, on 38 from 26 games.

Chelsea have still won only ONE Premier League game this year – beating Burnley on January 11 – drawing three and losing two of their remaining matches, and it’s hard to see how Lampard will guide his struggling side out their rut.

Nonetheless, he is still being strongly backed by the Stamford Bridge faithful, who remain delighted that a club legend is in charge.

Blues supporter Sam, however, is not happy – and he made his feelings known on Monday night’s Sports Bar.

“Frank Lampard is getting away with MURDER down at the Bridge,” his rant began.

“Every game he comes onto the middle of the pitch and claps the fans and they sing his name – it’s not good enough!

Milan lost to rivals Inter at the weekend while Juve suffered a shock defeat at Verona.

The Rossoneri edge past Torino in their cup quarter-final clash, winning 4-2 after extra-time.

The Old Lady, meanwhile, saw off Roma to reach the final four.

Inter head into the clash having beaten rivals AC Milan 4-2 at the weekend while Napoli suffered a surprise home defeat to Lecce.

The Nerazzurri beat Fiorentina in the quarter-finals while the Partenopei saw off Lazio.