Fabregas booked for diving, despite being kicked by Cazorla in the box. Mourinho will be in moaning overdrive if they don't win this.
Oliver gets it wrong again. Maybe not a penalty, but there was contact and no way did Fabregas deserve a yellow for that!...
The loss of Carrick to injury (and to some extent Jones) has made a huge difference. Loads of possession, but vulnerable again when the other team gets the ball. Some ridiculous errors today. Luckily, the chasing pack are a long way back and out of form
Fair enough. Dull Chelsea again, should've had a penalty or two but tough calls and you can have no sympathy for them as Fabregas was caught diving later. Cost me money though, knew I should've gone for <2 goals
Mourinho's philosophy in a nutshell: why win today, so we'd only need four points to win the title, when we can get a point in the most tedious and cynical manner so we can get the six points we need later.
My guess is fine margins. It doesn't hurt a team much to have to take a couple of extra flights and play an extra game a week. But It can't help, and what amounts to a minor disruption may be just enough to make the difference in games which are usually decided by the thinnest of margins. There's also a long term problem of player burnout, both psychological and physical. Finally, the early rounds may hurt a team due to the tendency to play down to the level of the the other team. It's easy to pick up bad habits playing weak opposition.
Absolutely, games are decided by the thinnest of margins, hence why it is important that the referee gets the right decision! It seems ludicrous that whether a team qualifies for the CL or not is almost as much due to whether they get favourable decisions from the ref as the way they play - and I suspect ref decisions have a much greater impact than anyone is admitting (although since the pundits still regularly trot out the "it all evens itself out" crap, that isn't saying much).
Seems the pundits can't agree about penalty and dives listening to Savage and Shearer last night,so what chance does ref have?
Shearer and Savage are idiots though, to be fair. The refs have a tough job and the authorities don't seem interested in making it any easier. Clamp down on cheats and those that abuse the officials and the standard would improve. It's that simple.
Have to say I was on Shearer's side in that argument. There was a touch on Fabregas, but not enough to impede him and he went down theatrically when he could have just run on. Not all contact is a foul. The ref got all decisions spot on except 1.Mind you, that 1 was a doozy, the foul on Oscar was the clearest penalty all season, can think of no excuse for the ref.
I thought Fabregas was very unlucky to get booked. Possibly no foul, and yes he made a meal of going down, but there was contact. The other one involving the keeper, as I said at the time, and Shearer said last night "how is that not a penalty" it was one of the clearest penalties of the season and Oliver bottled it!..
I can't believe how often I've seen officials gift Arsenal points this year. It's been much more shocking than in previous years. Oscar had two clear pens denied. The first was subtle and often isn't given. The defender's calf caught his heel, and he went down naturally, I thought. Then Ospina cleaned his clock with the ball miles away. On the other hand, Fabregas stuck his foot out after being fouled. I have no problem with his yellow card for simulation, even if there remains an unresolved issue about what to do when there's both a foul and simulation.
Having been bored stupid watching one rich Russian's club play yesterday, I'm looking forward to seeing another's play tonight with a lot more style and win an unlikely promotion to the PL.
Anyone surprised by the 0-0 score?Not many,I wager.Two teams both out to not lose and hoping for someone to put the ball in the net. Thank the Lord they are both out of the Champions Cup and won't have to bore us to death for much longer. I wonder if the Chelsea fans have woke themselves up enough to see the Chelsea team "celebrate"?! I pity those poor lads and lasses. Mourinho couldn't do it with Real,could he?They go out to win there so they had to get rid of 'The Strange One' before he bored them to death too!!!!!
The media in Spain didn't relentlessly kiss his arse, either. He really didn't like that. El Pais said that he saw losses as an, "opportunity for personal aggrandisement, self-promotion and the construction of alternative stories". He tried to sue Marca after one of their journos compared him to a hit-and-run driver, making a mess and not hanging around to deal with the consequences. He lost. He also pulled another one of their writers aside to call him a ****. Wonder why they were so negative about him!
