Malouda & Kalou were terrible post-2010, Malouda was ageing and lost his pace, the other wasn't that good in the first place, and once he wasn't around good players he became useless. Mikel was here for years and never developed into what we all hoped he would, he was content with being a squad player but even then I thought he was very inconsistent and not reliable enough. Although he did give us some good performances in cup finals which I won't forget. Matic re-started his Chelsea career on fire, he was superb, since the shocking Burnley game he never reached those performances again, he was definitely the weak link last season.
So like the players you just listed, there is a correlation to players who are getting scapegoated, they are underperforming.
I wouldn't say Rudiger is underperforming really although it was a shocking error, not quite sure what was going on through his mind. It was like a striker was playing in defence for the minute, but even then a striker probably still would have cleared it on instinct. But what I'm saying is, I'm sure if Rudiger carries on making mistakes he wouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt like he is now, if it were Gary Cahill we know far well what the reaction would be.
Kalou was a scapegoat of that time, he was never as bad as people in here made him out to be, and popped up with some decent goals.
Malouda was very good for a long time, but again got scapegoated in here.
Mikel did exactly what several top-class managers asked him to do, and he did it very well. The fact that it wasn't what a load of people in here wanted meant that he got dog's abuse most games, and every small mistake was jumped on vociferously, particularly in the toxic arena of the match-day threads.
Last season, in those same match-day threads, Matic was abused roundly, in the same way as Cahill, Willian and Fabregas are abused this season. Doesn't make it right, or even reflective of their contributions to games. But we all have to have someone to blame, don't we? Just look at the number of posts after a match like last night that include the phrases "x was totally to blame", "it was X or Y's fault, totally" or "f**king X doesn't deserve to be on the pitch when some 8-year old wunderkind who played half-way decently against some fourth-division pub team is not being given a chance"
Some people in here forget that football is a team game, that is unpredictable and depends on so many variables that all we can do is try to plan for eventualities.
For example, last night, no-one could legislate for the ball flying off of Dzeko's ear at the perfect angle for the right-foot of El Sharaawy, and 99 times out of 100 he would have hit row Z or the corner flag with that. And that was after 39 seconds when we could as easily have been 1-0 up already.
I'll accept that there are a lot of players to blame for their third goal, from Fabregas giving the ball away, to whichever defender didn't close down to Thibault getting beaten because of possible bad positioning. BUT, some people with an agenda, or hatred of specific players, could ONLY see Fabregas gave the ball away and we conceded. Small-minded know-nothings, mostly, but still buying into the blame culture.