Mancini: Fight Fire With Fire!

[MysticalDescent]

I'm not quite sure why people have reacted so angrily to some of my posts, I've barely mentioned or criticised Man City, I've just stuck up for my club in the face of all the 'knuckle dragging pub team' nonsense.

As a Stoke fan, the biggest concerns for me would be Barry (who had a pretty tidy game last time out to be fair) and Bellamy. What's the news on him, is he likely to feature? The worst you can do is try and imitate us. By all means, spend the last few days in training with all your players in the penalty area heading the ball away and get well drilled on how to make us less dangerous, but imitating Stoke is a bad idea. We had Tony Pulis' evil twin Allardyce bring his Blackburn here and they didn't set out to imitate us - they already take our play to darker extremes. They were a team put together to be meaner and tougher than Stoke, but we still beat them pretty resoundingly. Stick to the game that suits your players. If your team are motivated and mentally strong, they should on paper be able to beat us. Just don't be so sure about string passes around us and getting into the wide areas, the size of our pitch means that wide players (even our own sometimes) often fail to have any impact.

 

[BobKowalski]

I'm not quite sure why people have reacted so angrily to some of my posts, I've barely mentioned or criticised Man City, I've just stuck up for my club in the face of all the 'knuckle dragging pub team' nonsense.

As a Stoke fan, the biggest concerns for me would be Barry (who had a pretty tidy game last time out to be fair) and Bellamy. What's the news on him, is he likely to feature? The worst you can do is try and imitate us. By all means, spend the last few days in training with all your players in the penalty area heading the ball away and get well drilled on how to make us less dangerous, but imitating Stoke is a bad idea. We had Tony Pulis' evil twin Allardyce bring his Blackburn here and they didn't set out to imitate us - they already take our play to darker extremes. They were a team put together to be meaner and tougher than Stoke, but we still beat them pretty resoundingly. Stick to the game that suits your players. If your team are motivated and mentally strong, they should on paper be able to beat us. Just don't be so sure about string passes around us and getting into the wide areas, the size of our pitch means that wide players (even our own sometimes) often fail to have any impact.

Bellamy is likely to feature if fit and Mancini indicated no real injury problems in the PC today. And Mancini hasn't it would seem spent the last few days getting the team heading balls out of the penalty area. Its more about matching your spirit and fighting for the ball going by his comments. In short if this team wants to win things we have to go to places like Stoke and compete.

Like everything about City at the moment a lot of fuss about f**k all really