Tactically outclassed.
That’s the two word description of what happened there.
Here’s another 300 odd words to spell it out to those of you who didn’t quite understand what they were watching.
But look, for those of you who have made spreadsheets opposed to team sheets your bedside reading for the last sixteen years, the singular crumb of comfort I have for you is that City’s net spend is what, north of £400million, whereas we’ve only managed to have about £1million prised from our cold calculating hands.
The game itself was deeply unsatisfying. I’ll take, I’ll cope, with goals that offer relief rather than redemption any day of the week, but this was more reminiscent of us under Jol than it was a Pochettino performance.
Pep suffocated any notions we might have had of making Bonzo and Rose as caped crusaders and – AND reduced the magnificent Wanyama/Dembele axis to a pair of stretcher bearers having a bad day in Bosnia.
Eriksen deployed on the right became an irrelevance. All the Dele/Kane thing achieved was to render us with an even less effective grip on the game.
Pep sprung the ball into attack and bypassed the war of attrition and containment that Poch had planned for with the naivety of a 10 year old daydreaming about how he was going to spend his birthday.
An equally burdensome issue was that individually too many of our lot were so bewildered that their mental strength evaporated.
Despite those of you reading this mindlessly reeling out the ‘point hard earned’ line… Pep had a much better game of this than Poch, and worse yet when you start digging into the statistics, Poch in fact handed Pep our arse on a plate.
I can’t believe City didn’t win this comfortably.
Even if you factor out Hugo Lloris’ illegal betting pattern type madness, Kane and Dele were so painfully uninvolved that Kane only managed to complete something like 8 passes, I’m actually too angry to bother myself further to check. Bloody hopeless. Eriksen was another Japanese tourist wandering around asking directions.
That’s 3 of our supposed best players that effectively played with their shoelaces tied together.
This ought to have been a win, the draw in the mists of time will mask the fact that we absolutely bungled it.
We tried to score twice and the ball went in both times, they tried to score what, two dozen times to achieve the same amount of goals.
George, Zippy and Bungle(d) it.
