CSKA Post Match Thread

[BillyShears]

True but they both fall under the heading of bad decisions by the officials that benefited one of the teams.

No they don't. The rule is that if the linesman is in doubt the benefit of the doubt goes to the attacking player. There was significant doubt even when the replay was frozen so it goes without saying in real time the linesman made the correct call which was to give the benefit of the doubt to the attacker.

The penalties are totally different as I've already explained because the decisions were both wrong and both incidents were beyond any doubt. Hell IMO we should've had two pens because the challenge on Milner after his shot was a foul and booking too!

I mean what exactly are people suggesting here? That there is a conspiracy amongst European referees to give bad decisions against City?

I'm not suggesting anything other than last night the result came about as a direct result of another awful refereeing display in Europe. It happened to Chelsea a lot as well in their initial forays into Europe after Roman's takeover. Conspiracy? No. Ineptness? Most definitely.

So do we have to wait for refereeing to improve before we can be successful in Europe?

Or is there just a small chance that perhaps we could look at ourselves and what we can do to win a game

I'm not sure how you legislate for a blatant non penalty given as a penalty with less than five minutes to play. I'm not disputing that collectively the players were poor in the second half, however I also am not going to hang them out to dry as that was pretty much our strongest available selection and I fucking rate them. So I won't be buying into the Pellegrini/Vinny/Dzeko/Yaya/Silva/Milner is shit and we need to get rid narrative either.

Christ we drew a fucking football match. It happens. The overreaction on here is unbelievable. Especially considering the circumstances.

 

[Damocles]

Said it all in my post on the previous page. Seems to be a small group who act like they're Mark Ogden on Twitter. See and highlight only the negative about City in the most inflammatory of ways. We're shit/wank/fucked/clueless blah blah blah. The manager's a clown the captains not a leader the midfielders are all lazy. It's an endless cycle of negative sewage.

This pretty much happens after every bad result and it's not so much a small group but a large one looking to shift their own frustrations onto the first thing that they can find. Often this is the first thing that they read that they semi-agree with and the media narrative starts to build.

City are now known in the papers for "underachieving in Europe" which isn't REALLY true when you look at it. We aren't underachieving there because these games just happen to be in a European competition. It's not like playing Chelsea is any easier or much different than playing CSKA or Roma - the whole idea of different clubs in different countries playing in all these different ways isn't really a thing and hasn't been for a long time. It's an old cliche which is somehow still prevalent in how we talk about football but most of the CL sides will be playing in a similar style give or take.

Taken in isolation we've had some bad luck in these competitions but also lacked concentration on several occasions. The thing that IS different in the CL is how we seem to treat every game against Chelsea as a cup final but every game against CSKA as just another league game. We only tend to think those last 3 CL games matter and the first 3 are the "early season fixtures". We do tend to have this problem in the league at points too and City vs a big opponent or in a late round Cup game are also a different side to us in fixtures in September and October.

I don't know how many times City need to be in the CL to learn their lesson but as my nephew would say, people need to calm their tits. Sheikh Mansour isn't going anywhere. Man City isn't suddenly going back to midtable. We're one of the elite clubs now and that's where we will stay. Soon we will be successful in the league enough times for it to become more of a novelty and less of our desperate effort to win it and we'll start casting glances at the CL. At the moment our focus has been elsewhere and I don't think we're driven in the CL in the same sense that we're driven in the league. Our first efforts were pretty dismal because we were chasing our first title then trying to defend it against a resurgent Man United, our biggest rivals. Last year when the wank fest was on Liverpool and Chelsea we plodded along in the league and did fine. This season again when we're getting wound up every week in the press by people saying it's between us and Chelsea and every point matters and we've lost that concentration on the CL.

We need to find the right balance between the league and the CL in terms of importance and I do think that this has been floating around for a while now. If we have major challengers in the league we don't tend to really go for it in the CL.

 

[chris85mcfc]

No they don't. The rule is that if the linesman is in doubt the benefit of the doubt goes to the attacking player. There was significant doubt even when the replay was frozen so it goes without saying in real time the linesman made the correct call which was to give the benefit of the doubt to the attacker.

The penalties are totally different as I've already explained because the decisions were both wrong and both incidents were beyond any doubt. Hell IMO we should've had two pens because the challenge on Milner after his shot was a foul and booking too!



I'm not suggesting anything other than last night the result came about as a direct result of another awful refereeing display in Europe. It happened to Chelsea a lot as well in their initial forays into Europe after Roman's takeover. Conspiracy? No. Ineptness? Most definitely.

So do we have to wait for refereeing to improve before we can be successful in Europe?

Or is there just a small chance that perhaps we could look at ourselves and what we can do to win a game

I'm not sure how you legislate for a blatant non penalty given as a penalty with less than five minutes to play. I'm not disputing that collectively the players were poor in the second half, however I also am not going to hang them out to dry as that was pretty much our strongest available selection and I fucking rate them. So I won't be buying into the Pellegrini/Vinny/Dzeko/Yaya/Silva/Milner is shit and we need to get rid narrative either.

Christ we drew a fucking football match. It happens. The overreaction on here is unbelievable. Especially considering the circumstances.

Don't tar everyone with the same brush, ive not hung any individual out to dry, and when were good im the first on here to give them the praise they deserve.

But also if I don't feel we pulled our weight, in a game that should have been over at half time, then i think we have a right to question what went wrong?

I've expressed where I thought it went wrong, substitutions should have happened earlier, the mentality going into the second half etc. The foul on Dzeko was a shocking decision and 3-0 COMPLETELY kills the game, but even at 2-0 we should have more than enough to see the game out and more importantly not give them a glimmer of hope, but like I said we have this knack of giving teams hope and we did it again.

I think we will still go through, we have more than enough to beat Roma away and we may even beat Bayern, who knows. But last night should have been 3 points and lets be honest were all just pissed off with that regardless of how we all individually express our frustrations.

 

[Claytop]

1 question.

Have any of you seen anything in our 4 years of being in the competition that makes you think we can win the last 3 games?

Not sure I can

 

[Chippy_boy]

No they don't. The rule is that if the linesman is in doubt the benefit of the doubt goes to the attacking player. There was significant doubt even when the replay was frozen so it goes without saying in real time the linesman made the correct call which was to give the benefit of the doubt to the attacker.

The penalties are totally different as I've already explained because the decisions were both wrong and both incidents were beyond any doubt. Hell IMO we should've had two pens because the challenge on Milner after his shot was a foul and booking too!



I'm not suggesting anything other than last night the result came about as a direct result of another awful refereeing display in Europe. It happened to Chelsea a lot as well in their initial forays into Europe after Roman's takeover. Conspiracy? No. Ineptness? Most definitely.

So do we have to wait for refereeing to improve before we can be successful in Europe?

Or is there just a small chance that perhaps we could look at ourselves and what we can do to win a game

I'm not sure how you legislate for a blatant non penalty given as a penalty with less than five minutes to play. I'm not disputing that collectively the players were poor in the second half, however I also am not going to hang them out to dry as that was pretty much our strongest available selection and I fucking rate them. So I won't be buying into the Pellegrini/Vinny/Dzeko/Yaya/Silva/Milner is shit and we need to get rid narrative either.

Christ we drew a fucking football match. It happens. The overreaction on here is unbelievable. Especially considering the circumstances.

Christ we get a shit penalty decision. It happens. The overreaction on here is unbelievable. Especially considering the circumstances.

 

[BillyShears]

I've expressed where I thought it went wrong, substitutions should have happened earlier, the mentality going into the second half etc. The foul on Dzeko was a shocking decision and 3-0 COMPLETELY kills the game, but even at 2-0 we should have more than enough to see the game out and more importantly not give them a glimmer of hope, but like I said we have this knack of giving teams hope and we did it again.

So basically you're trying to manage the game in hindsight because of a refereeing decision. Look I get you're frustrated not just with last night but with our CL performances in general, I understand and respect that. However last night wasn't the culmination of some enormous problem we have in Europe. If i had to guess as to the reasons for the dip in performance in the second I'd say it was because key players (Silva, Milner, Kun, in particular) looked fucking fatigued which is no surprise considering they played on Saturday, then travelled to Moscow, and played again in a high intensity game last night.

I think we will still go through, we have more than enough to beat Roma away and we may even beat Bayern, who knows. But last night should have been 3 points and lets be honest were all just pissed off with that regardless of how we all individually express our frustrations.

Yeah fair enough. Apologies for I sounded like I was having a go at you i'm frustrated as hell as well. I just don't see last night as being some systematic failure within our camp, rather, to coin a Mancini'ism, it was more a case of "this is football".

 

[CatMan]

1 question.

Have any of you seen anything in our 4 years of being in the competition that makes you think we can win the last 3 games?

Not sure I can

Yes. Winning the last 5 games of last year's group stage including 3 away!

 

[citymad]

A Load of rubbish all this blaming a corrupt ref. Kolarov made a risky attempt at going for the ball and the Moscow player made the most of it. If he was corrupt he could've easily sent off Fernando for second yellow in that second half. Desperate times when we have to keep blaming the ref, it was the teams arrogance, naivety, lack of mental strength and just sloppy passing that blew the game last night.

 

[bluemanc1994]

Didn't see the game so only going off ITV's highlights. But did we actually have a chance 2nd half? Sounds as if we had the perfect away performance 1st half and should have wrapped the game up by HT, yet 2nd half was shocking by all accounts. Can't beat the weakest team in our group, can't beat a weakened Roma team at home just goes to show how far off success in this competition we really are.

Not buying this 'Group of death' rubbish, either. We're the best team in England and should be miles better than Roma and CSKA yet we have 2 points to show for it? The players need to take a long, hard look at themselves this year, as that points return is abysmal from those 2 games.

Beating CSKA is a must, which we *should* do at home as long as we don't get complacent, hoping Bayern beat Roma again. That puts us 1 point clear of Roma with 6 to play for. Last night's result now means we have to go to Rome and win and, as I said after the Roma game, it's Napoli all over again. If we turn up to that last game and put in our best performance, we are more than capable of beating Roma comfortably, yet I don't see it. We like to make things unbelievably difficult for ourselves.

Still fancy us to go through. Just.

 

[Quinny851]

Lazy, slow, pedestrian are just some of the words I'd use to describe last nights "performance". We brought last night on ourselves by not killing the game off. Yes we should have had a penalty and yes they dived to win their pen but had we shown a bit more passion and effort those decisions shouldn't have affected the outcome.

For those of you claiming the referee cost us the game then you obviously didn't see Zabba being at least half a yard offside for our 2nd goal.

Pellegrini was brought in to deliver in the champions league especially after his efforts with "lesser" teams such as Malaga & Villareal. Unfortunately the man just doesn't learn from his own mistakes and not only that but mistakes of his predecessors.