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Barry's Excellence
- Thread starter Dax777
- Start date
Fame Monster
Well-Known Member
bert38 said:kun said:Very, very good again IMO
You are joking right? Does it not matter what a play does when we haven't got the ball? Is it ok to walk around midfield letting others do your running? Is it that hard to follow your man? He does this often. Its fine against mediocre teams but he simply does not work hard enough, often enough without the ball.
Err maybe you are talking about Barry? If so, yes, head and shoulders our best player tonight.
You're right.
Yaya got plenty of possession in the game, enough to make himself comfortable on the ball. When he did get it, he wanted too many touches and ended up slowing the game right down. That meant, when the defenders got the ball, they didn't want to give it to him so he could lazily pass it back to them putting us under more pressure, so they ended up trying to force it - badly, I might add. Kompany being the worst offender.
Off the ball, where 95% of the game takes place, you have to work hard. He did not track his men, and looked utterly disinterested. He cheated his team-mates and were it not for Barry winning his battles and more, we would have been humiliated like we were in Munich.
Tonight, we needed someone to demand the ball and be prepared to drive forward with it at pace and drag players around. That player we needed was a normal Yaya, and when it turned out he was too mentally weak to put in that shift for us, Mancini should have brought on Nasri.
Mancini has let us down as lot of times this season. People might point to the fact that we're top of the league, but I'll preempt them and say we should be; we have by far the best players. What's more, we should be in the Champions League and not have to deal with the Europa League and its effect on our league form.
Mancini and some of his men ought to think about whether they fancy nights like this. I don't think Yaya fancied it, and I don't think Mancini fancied dealing with the confrontation of substituting Yaya. If we want to do big things, we cannot have off nights when it matters.