A few points about last night.
Nothing to get excited about, but a creditable performance by the squad players. That's about the size of it. Fact is, City were a body without a brain for the initial ninety minutes. Take the likes of Silva, Ferny, Nasri, Yaya out of the equation. You've got the whole story right there. As soon as Merlin was on, there was a mind in midfield, and everybody saw the difference. Pants: he can be slow to get down to shots along the ground (although he wasn't last night) but to me he looked rock solid for everything in the air. So he should, he's a big man. Talking about big men. I'm not one of the serial Dzeko slaggers, far from it, and I know he did some good things in extra time, but for the first ninety minutes, he was a ghost. Was he actually on the pitch, in fact? Everything about his body language says "Consider me gone". Did anybody notice that he didn't celebrate his goal ? Joleon defended fairly tidily. True, going forward, he always passes the ball square, as if to say "Got no idea what to do with this, mate. Have you got any ideas?" He leaves distribution to the more skilful players like Vinnie and Nastasic, but his positional sense, to me, makes him first choice over Garcia for that particular role all day long. Finally, Garcia. I'm not a Garcia slagger either — nobody who puts on that blue shirt is "shit", in my book, we're too big a club for that, now — but I just can't work out what Garcia was brought in for. Can anyone enlighten me? He's not skilled enough with either foot to be in our midfield (not when you look at who's there, see the above list), and he's not mobile enough and doesn't have the positional and pitch awareness to be a central defender. Perhaps he's our secret keeper for when we drop Joe? Or a striker for when Kun gets injured?
