CL...City v Barca - Live Thread

[blueboy]

I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!!

So, here we go people. Judgement day has arrived. No excuses now, especially after the way we qualified against Bayern and Roma.

The Manager must make sure he sets the team up correctly. I'm currently listening to Gary Neville on TS with Durham and he also agrees that the best approach will be to play Aguero up front on his own and not play with 2 strikers. Make sure their MF's don't start running the game, but also, we need to ensure whoever plays behind Aguero supports him quickly.

Haven't got a clue what the Manager will do....I'm just hoping he does play Ageuro on his own and get's the players playing high up the pitch and pressurising them when they have the ball.

Not long for teams news.......

[blueboy]

[blueboy]

[blueboy]

Team News

[blueboy]

Not sure about 2 up front....it just hasn't worked in Europe and especially against a Barca team playing 3 up front.

Barça XI:
1. Ter Stegen
3. Piqué
4. Rakitic
5. Sergio
8. Iniesta
9. Suárez
10. Messi
11. Neymar
14. Mascherano
18. J.Alba
22. Alves

[blueboy]

Adding Dzeko just puts untold pressure on Milner, Nasri, Silva and Fernando to make sure they pressure Barcelona...and if we don't do it well, we'll be in trouble as Aguero and Dzeko will become redundant in the game.

[Guest]

On tram now, feel like proper Rag fan, driven back from Hertfordshire straight here. Proper fancy us to Nick this.

[Nijinsky]

I has a good feeling about tonight until I saw the team

 Dzeko 

WTF is Pellegrini thinking?

[blueboy]

Guess he's going for it...I'm just hoping it doesn't backfire.

One things for sure....if he doesn't run and chase down like he did against Newcastle, he should never wear the shirt again. No excuse.

[titbumwilly]

MP will be looking at the exit door or being lauded as a brave tactical genius after this game.
It's down to the players to decide which it's going to be.
C'mon City, go out there and show some fight.

[blueboy]

That's the minimum they should give on a night like this...with the footballing world watching....anybody, and I mean anybody who doesn't bust a gut tonight needs binning.

If we get beat by a genius team...fair enough, but every single player needs to be at it tonight.

Hat-trick for Aguero????

[titbumwilly]

3-1 with Little Dave opening the scoring, that's what my blind optimism told me!

[Topdawg]

Standing off them. No pressure. Fernando shit. Company wank defending.

[Guest]

Fernando ball watching. Milners been shit... we miss TLF!

[blueboy]

Fernando and Silva want fucking twatting at half time.

Fernando is the laziest fucker I've seen in ages....he was lumbering around and did fuck all to help with that 2nd goal.

Silva just stood there.

The Manager can fuck right off for me.....2 strikers? What did I say before the game?

He's a fucking bellend. Brings that lump into MF...wtf is he thinking of???? What the fuck does he see in him that we don't?

Cannot get his tactics correct...cannot get the team up for THIS of all games.

Embarrassing. Fuck right off.

[blueboy]

you can obviously see I'm not happy with the manager....

[TMG]

Bye bye MP
2 up front is just pure naiveity. 5 in MF 1 up front. Keep it tight then maybe bring Bony or Dzeko on later but no the stupid fucka goes for his usual
This is already looking like an embarrassment !

[Topdawg]

Poor first half. No pressure on them at all. Kompany bang average. Too many mistakes to mention. I'd get navas on for Fernando who looks lost. We just can't control the ball under pressure.

[Topdawg]

I'm sure I said he'd play two up top again. It can work but you have to work you bollocks off and we haven't. Same as last year

[Topdawg]

I'm sure I said he'd play two up top again. It can work but you have to work you bollocks off and we haven't. Same as last year

[Topdawg]

I'm sure I said he'd play two up top again. It can work but you have to work you bollocks off and we haven't. Same as last year

[Guest]

I said my fairwell to that idiot months ago... I see most are now seeing the light!

[titbumwilly]

So, all the pre-match bollocks was just that, bollocks!
"We will not stand off them" "We have learnt from last season", "This is our turn to prove it on the big stage".
Wank, total and utter wank.
At two down, why wait another 15 minutes to change things at half time? It was a shambles and should have been sorted earlier.
Fucking sick of all this now.
Forget the City Brand, just produce a football team with heart, passion and a football brain ffs.

[leopold]

Two strikers. What a twat. If I'd known he was going to do that, I'd have stayed in Nottingham. We won our only two games on the CL because we had one up front. And no Yaya either.

Sort it out and fast, you fucking mongs.

[Guest]

I dont care about the goals we let in...the worrying bit is our fracking reaction to them which was non fracking existing

If MP cant motivate them for their biggest game in the season then I give up!

[Topdawg]

The fella next to me said someone wanted company for £60M,according to the papers. I'd take 6p right now. He's wandering around not looking across the back line. Wanka.

[Guest]

Men v Boys! Change it MP! Will he fuck!

[titbumwilly]

Just watch Kompany for the second goal.
Running round in disarray, with the football brain of a 9 year old. Please go.

[Guest]

We need Lampard, Bony, Navas on for Dzeko, Milner and Fernando. At least Bony will defenxld unlike that lazy fuxk Dzeko..

[Guest]

Nothing to lose now... we need to score a goal!! 

Will MP change? ! Will he fook!

[Guest]

Stroke of genius! 2-0 down so MP thinks we need to protect our loss... take a creative player out and bring a DM .....yyou cant make up

[shakencity]

We need the final whistle now. I'll happily settle for 2-1, with Yaya back for the 2nd leg we have a chance. If we concede again, we're out.

[shakencity]

Zab's just cost us the tie...knob

[shakencity]

I stand corrected...well done Joe

[Topdawg]

Why couldn't we do that all game?

[Nijinsky]

What a clueless shambles only Augero came out of that with any credit

[Guest]

What a twating game... im off... goodnight boys..

[Topdawg]

Bony didn't run much and he was was only on for 20 minutes

[shakencity]

"twating game"

[blueboy]

Sorry....but unless we sort out our defence and defensive coach...we'll always be short on what we need to win the CL.

TBF... that was a much better 2nd half, but it's no good doing that for 45 mins....when the game was over after the first 45 mins.

I can only blame the Manager for that first half, and can only applaud the Manager for the second....but that can;t be the way forward....and we've said this time and time again with this Manager.

His tactics and team selections are baffling. Only when we go behind do the team, or the Manager make them play with more intensity.

FFS....Fernando is an awful player with no pace or energy. Yet he is brought in against Barcelona.

Dzeko.....I'm not  gonna say anything else about this player that I haven't before.

I think Silva was equally to blame as Fernando and Kompany for the second goal....and Kompany stood off Suarez for the first...so the common denominator was another awful performance from our Captain.

Cannot see in any way shape or form, us going through now....even Zaba, wtf was that tackle about on Messi??? Just stand him up, he's going nowhere!!

Guess tiredness set in by then, but once again....the overriding theme for me is that the Manager isn't good enough for where we want to be or what we want to achieve.

And Sunday....if we don't beat the dippers, the knives will be seriously sharpened.

[TMG]

Watch the idiot will do the same against the Dippers - Play 2 up front & we'll get overrun in MF 
Tactical genius MP is not

Why is SuperFrank hardly getting a sniff anymore?? Hardly seen him since we managed to keep him til the end of the season. Does his CL credentials mean nothing to MP???

[Topdawg]

Was Silva playing out wide? He didn't do much in the 'bothering to mark opponents and make it difficult for them to pass' side of them game.

For their first goal, they had a corner down at our end. Did we mark them tightly so that it was difficult to find a man? Did we fuck. Easy throw a few yards to an unmarked man. That wasn't the only time either.

Kompany, as I said earlier, goes wandering without bothering to look at who he has left behind him at least 10 yards away. He doesn't look across to see that Dimi is playing said player onside now and that a ball over the top will lead to a 1v1.

2nd goal, he just hoofed it anywhere and it came right back at us.

Barca press us too much to allow us to have 2 or 3 touches. We need to give and go. Whenever I watch any clips of training, I see these drills where it's first time passes only yet we think we can have two or three touches in the CL. That may work in the PL, but not the CL.

We gave them too much respect and were also nervous. Too many first touches were poor and I can only put it down to nerves and offering too much respect. We should have been all over them from the 1st whistle, but we weren't. Their goalie had the luxury of being able to pass to a defender most of the time.

We played better 2nd half (they did drop off a bit too) and we had a hatful of chances, but they could have been 5 up at HT. If we'd started the match the way we started the 2nd half, I wouldn't complain if we'd lost.

[ManCityMan]

The first goal was a joke in the build up. We had a throw near the corner and fucked it up losing possession almost immediately resulting in a throw to them. As the Barca player stood with the ball there was a team mate 5 yards away totally unmarked and i was screaming at the TV to mark the guy and not let them take an easy throw but thats exactly what happened, and from that they created the goal and as Dawg said above, this happened repeatedly we just stood by and let them throw the ball to an unmarked team mate and we stood to far off them letting them pass the ball to whover they felt like!!!!
Bony contributed nothing and was off the pace, Dzeko was not the scapegoat this time he was not the worse by any means, Silva & Nasri need to stop taking corners or learn to get it over the first man they are no better than Navas at corners.
I thought MP had learned from last season and from the group games that you cannot play 4-4-2 against teams like Bayern and Barca and not get overrun in midfield!! He's getting on my nerves now and results like the Newky game are simply masking the problem.

[Topdawg]

We did get a few corners past the first man and Dzeko did get his head to one or two. But our guys didn't take the risk to charge into the are on the off-chance like Lampard does and Suarez managed for the 2nd goal. We must have had 7 players and the goalie in the box and they had maybe 3 players and they scored.

I did notice (in the Colin Bell stand) that a lot of season ticket holders weren't there. Lots of visitors, including from Spain. No chance of getting any atmosphere going. No-one singing except me and I need others to drown out my bad singing.

[blueboy]

On the corner issue....I was watching them closely last night and I thought the delivery was good on most occasions....but what I did notice that the players in the box were either not attacking the ball, running away from it, or more concerned grappling the man who was marking....and I thought "fucking great, we improve our corners and the pillocks in the box can't be bothered!"

And then....the usual happened...2 good chances for Dzeko, his first header wasn't on target and his second, he had all the time in the world to chest it down and slot it in, but he doesn't that quality awareness to think of doing that.

I honestly think the level of performance in the first half stemmed from a poor formation and players actually playing out of position against a very good team.

The second half the tempo increased, but let's get one thing straight here, the tempo increased, but Barca had a goal disallowed and should've scored from the penalty spot....so in theory, for all our huff and puff, starting with the same formation again at the start of the 2nd half....we still were lucky to come away with a 2-1 defeat.

You look at us last night...and you just wouldn't see Mourinho set Chelsea us like that. He would have potentially man-marked Messi, disrupting his time on the ball by niggly tackles, even fouling him consistently. He would never had set out with 2 up front to start with.

The Manager made a major fuck up here....and at 2-0 he should have made a change immediately. Dzeko didn't bring us anything in the 2nd half...and I agree, neither did Bony, but he's hardly gonna change a game with 25 mins to go.

Bewildering management...and if you read EVERY single online paper, or you listened to every single pundit prior to the game i.e. Gary Neville on TS as an example, every one said that he should ensure they have 5 in MF and work from there, no defend, but have Silva behind Aguero and let the others force the play on the Barca MF.....yet MP had some magical plan that clearly couldn't and didn't work.....he's poor tactically...and that selection of a 4-4-2 that included Fernando and Dzeko was nothing short of suicidal.

[Topdawg]

I'd have been tempted to play Navas just because he'd run around and chase back, not for what he'd bring us going forwards. Can we really play with Dzeko, Silva and Nasri when we need to press the other team?

[blueboy]

Nope

[Paulpowersleftfoot]

As soon as you saw the name fernando  on the team sheet,you knew we were fucked
what a cretinous bit of management,if tony pulis was in charge im sure we'd be doing far better than we are under our very own deadman  walking

[blueboy]

Did we expect anything else from him?

The players have to take plenty of the blame...but the set-up and selection just made life difficult from the start.

It didn't help that on of all nights, 3 or 4 players just did't turn up.

[TMG]

At least Arsenal did us a favour by being a lot worse than us 

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