blue ranger said:
Damocles said:
To be fair if the man leads us to victory over Barcelona then we'll look back on this as an aberration.
And he has that ability within him. Let's not go throw the baby out with the bathwater yet. He's not a bad manager, he's a manager with a very specific view on how things are done. Maverick would be the wrong word as that would paint an isolated figure where Pellegrini is the exact opposite of this, but he and the people at City seem to believe in their philosophy and think they're doing the right thing.
Outside of the youth problems with I now feel are pretty glaring, I don't have any problems with him and think he can potentially give us a result in Barca. I should say this quietly today because I understand that people are upset about the Boro result but I actually think he can win us the Champions League. He's a big game manager. He has always struggled against these types of teams, even in his very first games at the club.
It's important to remember we dont have Yaya in that first leg v Barca. Can't see us beating them in a million years.
The biggest disappointment for me is that this season we've lost the inability to defend. Even Kompany was diabolical today.
I suppose it's that I have come to terms with the fact that this team can't really play against those smaller teams who are up for it and want to press us off the pitch like a Cup Final (and I mean no disrespect to Boro who were a similar size to us pre-takeover and one of the big clubs in England).
If you think of those games; Stoke, Palace, Boro, Burnley, Wednesday, Sunderland, Cardiff - even Liverpool last year, a team that is willing to press us hard and are heavily motivated by their crowd and create a pressure cooker atmosphere makes us vulnerable. I don't think this is a Pellegrini thing as the same happened under Mancini and think it's a City thing.
Where I do think Pellegrini gets it wrong is that he seems to make the same mistakes against them - we play a style of football that is extremely conductive to quick countering games and combined with the high line/unsettled defence we struggle to defend it. I think our defence is better individually than it currently looks and we're not comfortable. I think our attackers have never looked better or more confident. Again, it's a trade off between the two.
This isn't really a plea to put 5 in midfield as I don't think it's that simple against these types of teams but just our players using their heads a bit more and trying to take the crowd out of the game using deliberate and slow tempoed passing would be a huge help to us as a club. Too often we let emotion and desperation to win overtake us - many times we come back and turn it around but it seems more based on luck than skill.
I have very few doubts in Pellegrini. As controversial as this might be, the person who I'm starting to doubt is Vincent Kompany. Not as a footballer who we know is one of the best in the world in his role but as a leader. He seems to live on emotions and is motivated in that heart-on-his-sleeve type way as many of our team seems to be. Pellegrini would probably provide a good influence on this type of player and centre them a bit. We admire those players in England and sort of give them more props as we get behind their emotion, but really I wonder if we'd be better served giving the armband and the captain's role to somebody who can keep their head and not get carried away quite as much?
I think of the difference between Scott Parker and Andrea Pirlo. Most Premier League watchers saw him charge around the pitch, diving into tackles and remarked how great of a player he was but really he was running around like a headless chicken. Pirlo played a similar position but was never charging around, never lost his composure and was always thinking about things clearly.
I wonder which one of them Vincent Kompany is more like.
