The rules aren't at all clear to me. A player who makes an honest attempt to win the ball but is too full-blooded and goes in studs-up with their foot raised is almost always shown a straight red, and that is even if there was no malice. The reasoning is simple: their challenge puts the opposition player at risk of injury and it is therefore grounds for 'dangerous play'. Why is kicking someone in the head with studs any less dangerous than kicking someone in the leg with studs? Does the PGMOL think our brain and central nervous system are stored in our shins? I don't think there was any malice in Jota's play: it was an honest attempt to win the ball, but that is irrelevant by the rulebook itself: trying to win the ball in that manner is dangerous play, end of.
Reading the sky artical with Kane where Sourness digs out HK , I would have thought Harry would have learned his lesson doing interviews with this bunch of shysters or has his brother the agent made another brain fart
I don't know why your one-note pathetic continuous jibing annoys me so much but it does. You've done this multiple times and it's just childish and sarcastic. It's not as if you're even bothering to discuss why you might disagree with me. No, instead you just label everything I'm saying as "conspiracy" when actually I have *never* used that word, nor believe there is such a thing going on. It's perfectly possible to argue there is bias without suggesting anything else. And that is what I am doing. That is all I am doing. And you are free to disagree with me. But your stupid responses are not constructive disagreement. I've asked you before to stop doing it, which was clearly pointless. Frankly I don't need any of this crap so I'm not going to ask anyone to take action against you, as for all I know you are being completely reasonable. So I'm going to take a sabbatical from this board until I calm down, and maybe longer. Well done, you win. And for those of you thinking this is an overreaction, you are not me, so you can't possibly know how this makes me feel.
What an awful April that was - the last 4 games have been all been poor in some respect mainly from a defensive point of view, but I have no desire to cover this ground again that we have done to death here. What I would like to talk about is our fickle mistress lady luck. Now I am not suggesting that we have more or less luck than anyone else, or that this somehow covers for the inadequacies in the players. However in the last 4 matches the opponents have had 26 shots on target that have resulted in 15 goals, we have had 25 from which we have scored 8. We have also hit the woodwork 6 times in those 4 matches. Newcastle (thoroughly deserved winners no mistake), but amongst their 6 goals were a long shot from Murphy that he would miss far more often than he would score and a goal from a pass by Willock that he would be likely to complete once in a 100 attempts. Yesterday Diaz goal could have gone anywhere give him that exact chance and 9 times out of 10 it misses the goal and and of the 1 in 10 that hit the target most would hit the keeper. You can say against United we got luck on our side when Bruno hit the bar, he should score so that balances out some of the bad luck and earlier in the season we won a few games very luckily, and overall where we are in the league 6th currently maybe 8th in the end will be about right. So whilst these results in the last month have been poor we have performed actually no worse in these matches than we have been all year its just that the luck ran out!
Our defence’s inability to actually defend probably accounts for about 85% of the goals we’ve conceded too in that spell. Add in Lucas ****ing Moura and there’s another for the tally. I know some don’t like the phrase Spursy but our gift of employing defenders who can’t defend is truly unique.
The problem is that we allow the opponents to have possession without trying to win the ball back. In the first half yesterday, defence and midfield were static and simply standing in their positions whilst Liverpool would pass the ball around. There was no concerted effort to win the ball back. Conte set the team up to absorb pressure and allow the opponents to have possession. This clearly doesn’t work. The best form of defence is to attack. This clearly worked in the second half until Moura acted like a prat, again!
It's an interesting set of figures and we seem to have talked a lot about luck on here in the last week. I commented earlier about the role luck plays in football and IMO it's a bigger part than it has in other ball games. When managers and players talk about football being a simple game I think they are taking into account the element of luck involved. I think it's why managers like Clough and Shankly always said stuff like 'put the ball in an area where it is in danger of going in the net'. The more confidence a team has the more they are likely to put the ball in the danger area giving more chance for luck to play it's part. Newcastle are a classic example right now. They simply have the confidence to run at players and put the ball forward. Yesterday in the classic game of two halves Liverpool won the first half and we the second but look at the number of times we were close to scoring and as you say luck was not with us. It says to me that we have an outstanding attack that will produce results given the confidence in the team to move the ball forward. We rarely did well against the top teams with Conte because he insisted on telling us, and the players, that they were better than us. His theme was working hard but his suggestion seemed to be we had to do that because we were not as good as the opposition. I found that an odd way to motivate your team. I think Conte felt that Spurs were below his normal level and he would try and help us but it was difficult because the players were not good enough. Right or wrong in that judgement I find that a poor way to get the best from players.
We were shafted by the officials in the Varpool game at WHL also, remember Sessegnon being clean through on goal and shoved to the floor from behind by TAA, which probably should have been a penalty and red card for Arnold. The game before that Fabinho was let off a deliberate elbow on Son.... I am seeing a pattern here.
I don't disagree with this but I do see HBIC's side of things which emphasises how tactics and injuries have massively magnified the issue. Asking that lot to sit back and absorb pressure is borderline insanity, especially given the fact that the managers who asked them to do it (Nuno excluded) made their names managing some of the most legendary back lines in history. Conte's Juventus team had Buffon, Chiellini, Barzagli and Bonnuci all in their absolute prime for crying out loud! But even this wouldn't be as bad if the midfield were offering more protection, which currently just isn't happening. Hojbjerg and Skipp will give 100% every game and may occasionally produce moments of brilliance (Skipp's pass to Perisic for our first was straight out of the Pirlo Playbook), but they simply aren't technically or tactically astute enough to impact a game either by preemptively cutting out an attack or by taking the ball through opposition lines to more dangerous areas. Bentancur is able to do this and I think it is one of the reasons why although we weren't playing good football, we were much harder to beat before he got injured. Even his mere presence in the side made opposition teams think twice before committing too many men forward as they knew one slip and he'd glide out from the back and would have Kane or Son bearing down on them within 5 seconds. Our poor defence and weak midfield were well known, though, which is why it still amazes me that we haven't used Sarr much more and shifted to a 3 man midfield, especially given the fact that Kulu and Son have been massively off the boil all season (although the latter appears to be playing his way back into it) while Richarlison has done nothing. It's not as if the 3 forwards have been especially crucial. Playing Sarr wouldn't necessarily make us that much more technically or tactically strong as he is still extremely young and inexperienced, but at the very least having an extra man over in those key phases of transition would've been enormously helpful. I didn't watch the game but those who did all said that we took full control of it from when Sarr came on and scored our second not long after. I'm especially disappointed in Mason, who I hoped would be more enthusiastic about giving the youngsters a chance to impress, especially with zilch to play for anymore. Moving forward, one of the first tasks awaiting our next manager is working out how to play Bentancur and Bissouma in the same team, something Conte never bothered even trying to figure out before injury made it a moot point. On paper they are our most technically gifted midfielders and, if they can work together, we can probably get away with replacing two instead of three members of the back line (Hugo and Dier).
His foot was high, but the rules don’t clarify how high is too high. It was an honest attempt to win the ball and Skipp did lean in, making the contact look at lot worse than it would otherwise have done. Ref had to decide if dangerous - and a red therefore, or reckless and yellow. I don’t think anyone can say the ref was wrong to decide it was reckless in the circumstances.
One thing to note is that teams seem to be setting up to absorb the high press and strike when players are committed high up the pitch, which wasn't the case between 2014-17 Look at the Runners' bottle job at the Emptyhad last week as the perfect example: the Mansourites invited the high press and Arteta willingly obliged, unable to see a trap being set and ordering his players to run into it and they kept getting picked off In other words, we need to set up our tactics differently to the Poch era as teams are getting wise to the high press that served us well in that era, so realistically what we need is a lot of quick passing going forward - and that's got to be the main part of the rebuild blueprint, because at present we have a bunch of players whose passing is anything but quick and that's costing us as much in Conte's system as it would in any progressive system
I understand that argument, but the players were facing each other so Jotta had ample time to see that raising a boot that high could or would have consequences. That takes it from reckless to dangerous in my opinion.
I agree that tactics and training definitely help. Having a Wanyama, Parker or Sandro would also alleviate some pressure on the defence as HBIC has indeed said but that’d still only be papering over certain cracks. Our defenders are quite frankly horrific at their jobs, the amount of unforced errors between many of them is making us laugh now rather than get annoyed. Between Porro, Romero, Dier and Sanchez there’s probably about 15-20 goals conceded this season that’s purely from their own poor doing, not opposition skill or brilliance. Romero may or may not come good with a more sensible and commanding head next to him but until we bring in some proper defenders, anything remotely close to the likes of Ledley, Woodgate, Gallas, Vertonghen, Alderweireld and Dawson, we could stick Makelele, Essien and Davids in front of our defence and we’d still see silly goals being conceded. I agree on Mason and said as such yesterday. He more than anyone knows how much getting chances as a young player means and the hunger that a youngster would play with. Yet his persistence with the same dead dogs, personified by his Lucas substitution yesterday, tells me he’s just another too afraid of making necessary changes, despite the fact the fans would 100% have his back if he canned the dross from the XI and bench.
