Incredible. It's the bloody rules since the beginning of the season, and it's been clearly instigated!! Any City player doing it (if they're not pushing the ball back to where the kick is due to be taken) is a bloody moron. They should be booked (as should anyone else) and get a good dressing down from Pep in private.
There are a lot of spoiling tactics that have crept into the game over the last ten years, and as a football fan (and not merely a City fan) I truly loathe them. They are making the beautiful game the ugly game. If, for example, keepers get booked for taking far too long over goal kicks I accept it (even when it's Ed). As for the rolling round with cramp when there's still fully twenty minutes to go, it's been suggested that the player should be removed to the touchline, and then not allowed back onto the field for a statutory five minutes. Believe it, It would stop Arsenal's antics dead in their tracks. But there must be some way of stopping that. (A player getting a bash to the head is, it hardly needs saying, an entirely different story).
By the way, I emphatically do not include taking the ball over towards the corner flag in the long list of anti-football shithousery that I would stamp out with warnings, then yellow cards, then finally red — you're playing the ball, which is your right, it's in play, all you're saying is “Ok then, you need a goal, come and take the ball — if you can”. Loved it when Bernardo did that to the rags years back. One of several gestures of his that I would mould a statue around (the other one would be of him holding a coffee cup casually).
