The Manyoo victory was
being hailed by some as a ‘marker’, a starting point to light a fire under our
season. It’s just a shame no-one told the players...
A 90 minute micro-version
That, “performance”,
just summed up our short season so far just perfectly - all over the flippin’ place!
At times – at very short times
– we looked lively and almost cohesive & fluid in our build up / attacking play.
But it was all way
too little and definitely few & far between.
In between those all-too-brief moments of last season’s
Manchester City, we were left with a disjointed team that is just…quite…baffling
to watch. We couldn’t even pass the ball to one another for large parts of
tonight's encounter! And the defence continues to look rickety and porous to say
the very
least!
That brings me onto one of our defenders in particular. If
the team’s display against the Russians sums up our 'up & down' season then in
Gael Clichy we have a player who goes one step further – quite brilliant against Manyoo just 3 ½ days earlier; a-ppallingly
bad against CSKA!
Desperate times calls for desperate measures – is it time we
started using Sagna or Zabaleta
at left back? Why didn’t we sign a left-back in the summer?!
No ‘T’ word just yet…but
the ‘I’ word is back with a vengeance!
After years of watching City I think we have definitely
locked away the Typical City
But well & truly out of the cupboard is the Inconsistent
City
Most of those players tonight won us the Premier League and League Cup last season for flip’s sake - there’s just something not right
within the camp and I just can’t put my finger on it; I can only guess.
- Is it that we have the same players remembering what happened the following season after we won the league under Mancini?
- Is it an issue with troubled Toure upsetting the dressing room somehow?
- Is it too many “leaders” in the dressing room with the likes of the very vocal, I’m sure, Hart, Zabaleta, Kompany and now Lampard?
- Is
it just too many players having an ‘off time’ at the SAME time? Over the
short season so far you can stick the labels “poor” and / or “inconsistent” onto Caballero,
- Have the players perhaps somehow and for some reason lost faith in the manager?
- Is it just some bad luck? I have noticed that we are often just inches away from a good pass coming off, a shot on goal and being turned down for obvious fouls and blatant penalties a-plenty.
I dunno…
What I will add in our defence about tonight’s game is that
the referee was appallingly bad! But that’s about it; most of those players
need to take a long, hard look at themselves.
OUT! OUT! OUT!
Quite unbelievably we’re only 2 points behind both CSKA & Roma and, therefore, could still qualify! And, I’m sure, our manager will go ‘all out’
to try to achieve that goal.
I’m typing this shortly after the
game and the situation must be really getting to me – I’ve just had my
first nose bleed in years! Weird…
But I
want out now, I really do. We’re just not good enough, clearly, to complete at
several levels and we’re going to severely damage any chances we might have of retaining the Premier League if
we attempt to compete in Europe any longer
this season.
It
might be unprofessional, it might be embarrassing and we might even get into
trouble for not trying; but just get out of this situation now, City, and
plough ALL of our efforts into the League and F.A. Cup.
God I hope we don’t finish 3rd…
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