City v Chelsea post match

the blue panther said:
You must have the bluest of blue tinted specs ever! Aguero was airborne, so if he doesn't get an extra ban, I'll be amazed.
I think that he thought that Luiz was going to put him in the stands, so, he got his retaliation in first. And that's fine, but, no good to us, and it will mean that the end will come for him at City sooner than most of us would like, because 2 big suspensions for our main striker with only a third of the season gone render him unreliable as far as Pep is concerned in the long term - imho.
We should have been out of sight in the first hour. Bad finishing, leaving us under pressure, and exposing our crap defence. Fix the finishing and everything else gets much easier.
We exposed Chelsea in that first hour; they exposed us afterwards!
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That's pretty much the match I saw. I turned to the bloke next to me at the end and said that there was no possible comparison with that performance and, say, the matches against Liverpool and Leicester last season where we were absolutely thrashed. For the whole of the first half, and part of the second, we played clearly the better football. Chelsea are very, very good at what they do – three surgical strikes, bang, three goals. They're hard to get through, too. But there were many decent things to take away from that match. The defence is not good enough, but the world and his wife knows that. Pep couldn't do everything coming in in the summer, and he knows that that's the next job to be done. Did I expect us to win trophies this season? Not necessarily. For the first ten matches of the season, we were everybody's flavour of the month. Then it was Liverpool's turn. Now it's Chelsea's. Long season, the wheel will turn again. I think we were a little bit spoiled, honestly, for those first two months, and I genuinely believe that we didn't always play very good football, and that furthermore, we've played better football in some matches (Everton, a significant proportion of Saturday's match, MIddlesbrough) and got sod all out of it.
By the way, having seen that back on telly, that's a red card on Luiz in the first half, and no messing. It's not even vaguely ambiguous. It didn't look so in the stadium, and even less when you see it back. Secondly, that's an absolutely savage tackle by Sergio at the end, and we should have the balls to admit it. Potentially a career-ending tackle. Not worthy of a great player, and a good guy, and very unprofessional to boot. Anyhoo, could this be Kelechi's chance to really assert himself?
 
Now that the red mist has finally cleared, I can look back on a strange game that, despite all the calamities, cock-ups, and plain stupidity, we could easily have won.
The main worry is that Chelsea's match winners are winning matches. Ours are suffering a severe dip in form, and it's been going on for longer than most people think.
 
I've avoided the news and forums this weekend because I wanted to take a bit of time to calm down, but I'm still mightily pissed off about Saturday and I am really quite embarrassed by what happened at the end of that game. Yes, there were a few wrong calls from the ref but he wasn't the reason we lost. Essentially the difference between the two sides was this: Chelsea are smart and disciplined, and we are not.

Watching Otamendi fly in for that challenge on the half-way line and get rolled by Costa for that second goal was cringe worthy. I really can't stand that idiot, the guy is a total clown. In many ways it exemplified the performances of the two sides and the differences between them; Chelsea do not have any players as stupid as Otamendi.

What Aguero and Fernandinho did was just plain stupid and selfish. I despise Luiz and Fabregas as much as anyone but our players really let us down there and should know better. We'll now be without arguably our two best players for at least the next three games because they couldn't take losing. We're only 4 points behind Chelsea and could easily make up that gap in the next three games, had those players kept their cool.

It's going to take a summer transfer window to sort out that defence, which we all knew beforehand (Pellegrini totally at fault for it). And it starts with shipping out Otamendi.
 
Our results against supposed top sides (chelsea, arse, spurs, liverpool & rags) is bloody awful. Not sure why but we have taken only 11 points of those 5 teams out of a possible 39 since the start of last season. 6 of those off a shocking chelsea side last year. With 2 away games at arse and liverpool (where it feels we never get anything) we need to start getting some results against these teams on more regular basis. Saturday was so disapointing for me because we had that game totally under control and had we taken our chances would of burried chelsea before we gifted it to them. Feels we are always on catch up as we struggle to beat our rivals.
 
When Sergio was deliberately bowled over by sideshow bob with 20 minutes gone, when through on goal, the referee, inexplicably, took no action. This shocking decision must have sent out a clear message to the rest of the Chelsea side that they could do pretty much whatever they wanted in the match.
Sergio seemed to be targeted throughout the game and I wasn't surprised to see him react at the end.Wrong - but understandable.
Some posters have got a downer,rightly or wrongly on Bravo. It all stems from the match against the rags when he had the mix up with Stones which cost us a goal, since then he has made a few great saves and shown a degree of composure in his area which is better than Joe could manage . Joe a great reaction keeper yes - cool head - no.
On Saturday, perhaps Bravo didn't have such a great game, but he wasn't the only one in the back 4!
Finally, what happened with Kevin?
He missed a sitter, badly. Score that and we win the match. Also, later on, when one of the Chelsea players has a lie down, instead of playing to the whistle, he took it upon himself to knock the ball out.Wtf? This was an important match - one that we could and should have won- and he does that? Pep , have a word.
A heads up to Sane and David btw.
 
Lovebitesandeveryfing said:
That's pretty much the match I saw. I turned to the bloke next to me at the end and said that there was no possible comparison with that performance and, say, the matches against Liverpool and Leicester last season where we were absolutely thrashed. For the whole of the first half, and part of the second, we played clearly the better football. Chelsea are very, very good at what they do – three surgical strikes, bang, three goals. They're hard to get through, too. But there were many decent things to take away from that match. The defence is not good enough, but the world and his wife knows that. Pep couldn't do everything coming in in the summer, and he knows that that's the next job to be done. Did I expect us to win trophies this season? Not necessarily. For the first ten matches of the season, we were everybody's flavour of the month. Then it was Liverpool's turn. Now it's Chelsea's. Long season, the wheel will turn again. I think we were a little bit spoiled, honestly, for those first two months, and I genuinely believe that we didn't always play very good football, and that furthermore, we've played better football in some matches (Everton, a significant proportion of Saturday's match, MIddlesbrough) and got sod all out of it.
By the way, having seen that back on telly, that's a red card on Luiz in the first half, and no messing. It's not even vaguely ambiguous. It didn't look so in the stadium, and even less when you see it back. Secondly, that's an absolutely savage tackle by Sergio at the end, and we should have the balls to admit it. Potentially a career-ending tackle. Not worthy of a great player, and a good guy, and very unprofessional to boot. Anyhoo, could this be Kelechi's chance to really assert himself?
Click to expand...
I agree Pep couldn't do everything coming in in the summer, he did however manage to pay 20 million for an absolute shite goalkeeper
 
caseball said:
What Aguero doesn't do so well is attack crosses and we put a lot of crosses in these days. Yesterday it was about all we did. I don't understand why people are saying we played well. I can only recall one good passage of play, which led to de Bruyne's miss. We used to break like that all the time. We're becoming a dull and scrappy team enlightened by the odd flash from de Bruyne and sometimes Silva. It wouldn't be bad if the defence was impregnable but the opposite's the case. Otamendi was atrocious yesterday. Kept getting under the ball in the air and selling himself on the ground. It doesn't take much to spook them. There's a lack of organization at the back. The only thing we are consistently good at is passing ourselves into trouble. The trajectory is definitely downwards at the moment.
Click to expand...

Sadly most of what you say is correct and this downward movement may not be that easy to arrest in the short tern at least. We have a few big weeks ahead hope we are not out of it by New Years Day.
 
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