You have to remember Mane is small and skinny as ****. A big gust of wind will probably blow him over. As Laces said, he exaggerates a bit much.
Thought it was a good match...you created more and if you'd won it would have probably been deserved. Pleased we showed the work rate and bottle to get a result. 2 questions...do players normally slip so often on your pitch? And does Mane dive often? All teams have divers (chadli has done a few this season) but i honestly haven't seen a player dive so often in a match. I thought he was an embarrassment to himself today. Real shame cos he seems to be a really good player
Probably didn't even need to buy one, tbh. There were some reasonable options available on frees in the summer.
He's a cracking player, but does go down easily. To be honest though, as I saw it, all the fouls he 'won' were actually fouls, he was just exaggerating their effect somewhat...it's not great to see but it's not out-and-out diving/cheating.
Odd criticism of Mane. The point isn't that Mane dives or exaggerates fouls, it is that he is not as subtle as others. Sadly, 95% of premier players do it. I don't understand how you can criticise Mane when he worked so hard and showed so much skill.
As much as some people hate it, diving is part of football, pundits/commentators are encouraging it whilst saying they aren't. How many times have you heard "he feels contact so has a right to go down" said by commentators? The player only has a right to go down if they are actually tripped enough to lose their balance, anything else and it is technically a dive. In some countries it is seen as a great skill and is actively encouraged. The players never get blamed for it, the refs do for being fooled. Refs don't help either by basically never giving pens unless a player goes down, meaning the players feel they have to go down to exaggerate the foul. This is a bit of a chicken/egg thing though because refs may think that because players go down so easily in general if they stay up then it cant possibly have been a foul.
I may just have puked a little in my mouth from my nervs (remembering Gazza last season). But I would play Gazza the rest of the season...
Pelle was asked about the pitch...he said perhaps we are too fast Pundits on BT agreed we should have won the game as we were the better side....they also pointed out Mane's diving.
One of my random rambley thoughts... Our defense has been our keystone this season and since the turn of the year there have been huge criticisms of our attack, but for me in that time period our defence might have actually cost us more points. We've now conceded really cheap, poor goals against West Brom, Everton, Stoke and now two against Spurs which have basically cut short our chances of getting in the top 5, bit of bad luck in them but bad defending too. Come to think of it Costa's goal against us was pretty poor as well, a free header from 6 yards from a floated cross. Our defence has set a very, very high standard for themselves, and kind of like our season as a whole you can't complain too much about a bit of a drop off when it's been so fantastic overall, but we've kind of built ourselves into a defend-first team so though it's harsh I think blame has to be apportioned. People can complain in games like the West Brom and Everton ones that the attack didn't threaten enough or should have scored, but cheap goals allowed the other team to completely sit back and play in their own third, which is something absolutely any team struggles with and us a bit more so than most (Don't buy that we are considerably worse than any other team though, think that's just people being short-sighted) and we know that so conceding goals early is a cardinal sin. So for me the defence that concedes the early goal is more to blame than the attack that can not recover from it and now in our last two games we've actually taken leads but let them slip in dreadful circumstances. Like I said, overall the defence has been fantastic so no real complaints, but shouldn't be overlooked when weighing up the season that they've cost us points too and in this stretch maybe more than our frequently stuttering attack.
The regression in defense and attack in the latter half of the season is also partially due to the squad size. We rely heavily on that back 5 who are first choice, but beyond that we have very little depth. Also missing Wanyama today who is such a weapon as the first line of defense.
Last season I thought we had a mid-table side that played every week like champions. Through not taking our chances and making individual errors you could say we got what we deserved - finishing 8th (our best ever finish) - but it could have been even better. This year the squad is slightly stronger, and we are more flexible tactically, but we still lack quality at vital moments. Like last season, I have come away from most games extremely proud, but more often than not frustrated - even when we win! We are nailed on for 7th, and after the exodus in the summer, that will be an incredible achievement. But it almost hurts more to be so close and yet so far.
Not dissimilar to last year (though we aren't playing the crazy high line); because our front players haven't been prolific, we have had to push more up in support of them, which means more attacks coming in the other direction against defenders who are backpedaling. Particularly in central midfield, where we've been pushing the screening man up more than we did earlier in the year.
