Not the defeat that bothers me, it was the manner. As soon as we switched to standing off you could see there would only be one winner, and that was when we were winning. Refuse to judge individual performers apart from the ones that never change like Conner and his touch and Buckley with him not being a premier league standard. Otherwise the Job was made impossible. Harsh on Coates to put him through that as well, never had a run in the team, just come back from injury. He and JoS should have been protected by the midfield pushing out and applying some pressure further up the pitch. Gus' tactic put them right under the cosh. But still, Gus can't get it right every time, he's still learning. Rather the bad decisions come against a team we'd struggle to beat then against a team we should be beating.
I thought we had a go at them and moved the ball around well in the second half, with the midfield working hard to develop an opening.
One thing that is being missed and seems pretty major to me is that its one thing matching teams of Chelsea's and man city's level over 90 minutes, but to do so over 180 minutes with the second game only a few days after the first is another matter entirely.
Absolutely spot on. I think it's crazy having those games so close together - as I mentioned on another thread yesterday, only us and Stoke from the bottom half are not playing anyone else from the bottom half in this 3 game run of fixtures - I would've swapped our games for anyone elses in the country and I reckon no-one else would've swapped theirs for ours
