HaydnNUFC

When you play these you have to limit the space. If someone commits to closing down their intelligence and movement will punish that player for moving out of position and move the ball into the space left by that player. Our ball retention you can put down to the fact we just have poor players, which we do. I doubt in Rafa's tactical approach he wanted the players to hand Man City possession as soon as we won it back, but that's what we did and we do it against many sides. It showed really badly on Wednesday because of how well Man City retain possession and badly we were at retaining it. As for the approach, look at Napoli v Juventus at the start of this month. Juve scored in the first 12 minutes iirc and then camped out in their half for the remainder of the game, about 3-4 players committing to breaks and the same number on attacking set plays. Rest of the team back. Juventus won the game but was that approach cowardly? Was their football just surrendering as you're implying ours was? Allegri was hailed as getting the game tactically spot on. If he lost it I'm sure he would've been lambasted. If we got a point on Wednesday the press would be hailing our tactical approach. And so would many on here who haven't done so.

Good result for us.

Don't do this, Arsenal.

World class. Get in.

Strike.

Arsenal gone to utter shit.

Oh, do fuck off.

http://www.nufc.com/html/2006-07html/2006-10-19fenerbahce-h.html I miss European nights. :'(

It's almost like there isn't a gargantuan gap in quality between us and them and morale isn't a factor whatsoever.

Cabaye Robert Emre Shearer Solano Townsend Viana? Struggling after that.

Solid off the ball. Horrendous on it.

When? Gayle's header. Aarons' chip. Gayle deciding to go down instead of getting a shot off. The pressure on their goal in the last 10.

Man City are far better than Man United. They're world class. One of the favourites for the Champions League ffs. Tonight is what we have to do in order to give ourselves a chance of getting a result. Don't like it? Don't go to the game or watch the game then. It was obvious how we were going to play and we could've gotten something from the game. I'm proud of the team and Rafa for that. Man City will hammer far better teams than us before the end of the season.

It's so f***ing weird man. Wanting us to "have a go" and get embarrassed and take a huge hit to GD and morale amongst the players and the fanbase going into Brighton. A 0-1 loss in which we could've nicked something is far far better than a 0-5 or 0-6 humbling. If you don't get that, you don't understand football.

Finally.

There's just genuinely no sapient logic behind some of the posts tonight, like.

If you can't see the difference between this team and that team then that says it all tbh. I mean we were already f***ing 3-1 down in that Benfica game So that just shows we had nothing to lose tonight. We couldn't afford to concede again to Benfica and had to turn it into a sprint. Tonight it was horrible to watch that first half and it was clear that we were going to concede and if it went 2-0 it was game over. I'm just not comfortable turning up to watch my team not try and win a match. If Gayle's header went in, would you be complaining?

Not really arsed about the news. We've known it for ages tbh.

Honestly hope you told them that they're c***s, know nowt about football, and deserve Pardew and Ashley. f***ing state of them. No idea why I'm getting so riled up about either.

Outstanding when he came on. He's so good, man. Only gripe with today is not bringing him on 5 or 10 minutes earlier.

Thought he was canny. He's good on the ball and mostly useless off it. But defensively okay tonight. Everyone had to be that at the very least.

Was okay today. Nowt more though. We need better if we're to progress.