Re: City v United pre match thread
eversince 76 said:
Getting fed up with this 4-4-2. Not, I don't mean Pellegrini playing this system, but the constant nagging about this system by loads on here week in week out and whenever we have a poor result. The poor results in the last week (because that is what we are actually discussing, not the system that brought us a PL- and LC-title not so very long ago) had nothing to do with the system being played.
And I'm not even go in to Pellegrini facing the sack. If he would, I wouldn't trust the management of Txiki, Soriano and Khaldoon for another second.
Same with the Silva-discussion. It could have happened to any of our players. And it could have happened to him in training. In hindsight it's all so feckin easy. I for one appreciates Pellegrini playing a strong team in any competition, because I want us to win silverware of any kind and he shows respect to every competition. Maybe we should have played a B-choice in every position like United did when they traveled to MK Dons. Great.
Recent results surely harmed the confidence, or may have given United some extra. Whatever. It's a derby and the last few years we are playing some pretty good stuff when we are up against them lot. 4-1 and 3-0 was way too easy anyway, so I welcome a bit of opposition from them. I'm sure the players are well up for this one. That doesn't mean we will win it, far from. But I'm sure we will see a completely different game from our boys. With or without Silva (didn't we play without him when we easily beat them 4-1 last year? Pretty sure we did).
I'm alread nervous as hell, and all these depressinig comments don't help. Especially if that's the attitude we fans take with us on Sunday. Get your act together. We hate United and everything they stand for (which is shutzero). We are City. If we can't get through a bad spell of 3 games, we have turned into rags ourselves. Let's put that one to the players when they enter the pitch. Nuff said.
I agree on the Silva stuff but not the system. I personally blame the system because I seriously think Pellegrini has gone one more than last year and tried to reinvent us to the point where we play like this every game but what he is getting wrong is that it isn't necessarily the best way. We should always seek to improve, not say we play like this no matter what. At the moment we need to improve ourselves defensively and worry about not losing but it's not being done. No work is being done on adapting to how the opposition play and sorting us to not lose first and foremost. We look constantly flat in midfield and it's no wonder Fernando/Fernandinho lose the ball in midfield so much, it's because they are targeted and get pressured. If we had one striker, we'd be giving them someone to run off the ball and keep it calm, Silva usually does this by dropping deep but he can't do that when recently he has to be diligent defensively on the left side.
For me we are imbalanced and our weakest areas are down the left where I think not only are Kolarov and Clichy in bad form but they also get zero protection due to the lack of a defensive minded player on that side. I really don't think this system has any place in modern football, it has been found out quickly and teams like West Ham, Newcastle etc shouldn't be having 5,6,7,8+ chances a game against us. We could of been 3-0 down at HT to West Ham and we could easily of been 3-0 down AND down to ten men against a weakened Newcastle. Teams are no longer coming here to lose because they have nothing to fear of us anymore, we aren't confident and have stopped scoring and our shambles of a defence/defensive midfield is getting found out on a weekly basis. At this point there is a need to just stop us conceding, we have more than enough quality to score goals but there is no confidence and that is resulting in collapse. When we go 1-0 down it never used to worry me but the way we are now I really do think we could be in for a big hiding once we play a team that will put chances away.
The fundamentals of a title winning side is one that whilst scoring a lot of goals also concedes invariably less. Right now in the league we are conceding a goal for every 2 goals we score at home and it's even worse away. To me we are not doing enough to understand the opposition, sometimes you need to adapt your system to the other team and it has cost us so many games this year. It's like there is an ego in that we have to play this way because it works, it doesn't and it clearly isn't doing. It worked last year but we still conceded a lot of goals. Games like the Arsenal 6-3 are ones I really think would end up differently this year.
As for United, we shouldn't fear them because we have battered them everytime we have played them over the last 4 years but we need to ensure we aren't naive and think this will be another 4-1, 6,1, 3-0 etc. They were shite in those games but have strengthened considerably, this game is different and should be treated as such.
A big win would lift us but there is nothing wrong with being cautious, a clean sheet would probably do more for our confidence than anything else right now.