"Mibbes aye. mibbes naw" King Kenny. Louise Taylor is a Mackem and had a pathological bitterness about Phil Brown. She is more clued up than the London lot, but that int saying much. Richard Rae and Arindam Rej know the score, and in general the papers are better than the tv in understanding what has happened at our club.
Robbertson's cock-up is completely irrelevant to my point that as a team we went to pieces when Huddlestone came off. I don't need to read about it anywhere, I sat and watched it.
Just watch Liverpool v Stoke, good game. Just goes to show the luck from bottom to top, Fimino scores hits both posts and goes in, Robbo hit the inside of the post and stays out.
He, Mason, did very little wrong, in fact he did very little as usual. Perhaps we are expecting too much for our mere £15,000,000 pounds.
I think Mason looks tidy in possession and can celery pick a pass. But... He's never played week in week out before, as anything other than the well favoured "one of our own" type. He's probably never played a single minute for a team in the bottom three of the table. And he's never played with players as average as those assembled by today's Hull City. He has a lot of adjusting to do. And gobshites writing off his every effort as "nothing" is unlikely to help him adjust.
So it's the nasty fans fault that he's looked ****ing useless so far? I'm happy to accept that he's no left winger and it would be unfair to judge him on his performances there. I'd also accept that he's not had a run in his preferred position, but if he plays as piss-poorly as he did yesterday, he'll be lucky to get a run in the 23's, never mind the first team.
I must admit I never rated him as a manager, even when he was at Barcelona. I don't think its a problem with the players' quality but rather the way they have to play. I was expecting Toure to run at us with the ball a number of times when he had a clear opportunity to do so, instead he passed it. It seems the old swashbuckling, attacking style of play you used to associate with Manchester City has been replaced by something akin to trench warfare, lots of passing sideward and very pedestrian. In a small way it reminded me of us under Steve Bruce. Until the penalty it didn't look like they would score, never mind score 3. As to Mike Phelan. In parts he has us playing some really good football. We look a far better team then under Steve Bruce. The only problem is we don't do it often enough. After screwing up with my timings yesterday I'll dip my toe in the water. He took Huddleston off and put Mason on because he was going for the win. Mason is an attacking midfielder and should have given us a bit more upfront than Huddleston. Livermore was to play the defensive midfielder role on his own. Bruce would have settled for the draw and taken off Mbokani and put on Meyler. When they scored the penalty he took Livermore off to push for the equaliser. That left a big hole in our defensive midfield which Manchester City exploited. I don't really see that he did that much wrong with what he has at his disposal.
Mason's contribution is NOTHING!!. In a sense you are right that he did very little wrong because he is NON-EXISTENT. Like many in the crowd I groaned from six thousand miles away when the commentators mentioned he was coming on. But that was only HALF of it. When they announced he was coming on for Huddlestone, our best player who had dominated mid-field, I literally screamed NOOOOOOO!!!!! in sheer frustration. Phelan's substitution of our best for our WORST was incomprehensible. Hudd must have been thinking "what the hell is he doing" when he came off. "Apres Moi le Deluge"...yes Tom you got that right. Within ten minutes we were THREE goals down after dominating them for 25 minutes. Our resident fairy snowflake floated around mid-field, marking no one, tackling no one, little mincing steps, trying his best to appear inconspicuous, afraid to be near the ball, ignored by his teammates. As Chazz pointed out last game NO ONE PASSES TO HIM even when he is the nearest target. THEY KNOW, WE KNOW, ONLY PHELAN IS BLIND!! Instead of nine points which we could have had from the last three games and a position well above the relegation zone we have ZERO!!! and last place. At the end of the season when we are again condemned to the Championship and an almost certain further slide into footballing mediocrity under the disgraceful Allams, I believe we will look back on this end year period and wonder what the hell Phelan was doing. The tragedy is that nine tenths of the team are well capable of keeping us in the top tier.
Mason is the biggest waste of money ever made by Hull City (imo) Who the hell decided to sign him ? Not Phelan I hope.
I said exactly the same thing three pages ago Filey (#224). I would dearly like to know whose decision it was to pay a record fee for this piece of crap!!! I assume this was Ehab's doing. AAAARRRGGHHHH!!!
No need to apologise, I'm not sure where my views on Guardioli came from, they just appeared one night watching Barcelona on TV. Nothing I've seen since has made me change my mind. I think he's massively over-rated. As to Phelan, he's a work in progress. I've seen us play some really good football this season with hints of what we could become with the right investment in the squad. Putting Mason on instead of Huddlestone made sense, it just didn't work. I think its slowly dawning on Phelan that our central midfield only works when he plays Livermore and Huddlestone together.
The entire team went to **** after the first goal, if he'd have started the game and been awful then you might have a point. I'm not sure what he was supposed to do while the rest of the team pretty much gave up shortly after he came into the game. And don't blame his substitution for the collapse, one stupid tackle from a good player caused that, Mason's introduction was purely coincidental.
Never played in right position, never had a run in the team, playing in the worst team in the best league in the world, he's hardly going to set the world on fire. I agree we over paid but we were desperate and I agree his performances have been poor so far but it's just poodle behaviour to write him off already.
