When we're ahead in a big game, when do you see one of our players stay down after a foul and eat up time getting treatment? How often do our players take a week to be substituted? How often do our opponents do it to us? Stuff like this is niggly but the teams that win stuff do it. We're so naive.
25 really good minutes, followed by 20 average at best, followed by 45 of complete ****. We cannot hope to win games at this level with four key players not performing for most of the game: Dembele, Son, Kane were all below par. Eriksen seemed to run out of ideas although that may have not been helped by those around and ahead of him. Taylor was dreadful as well, but whilst he should have shown red for persistent following to a couple of theirs, we completely failed to put Valencia under any pressure after he was booked in the first half. Bottom line, we only have ourselves to blame and the best advice I can give you lads is to put your tin hats and flak jackets on, as the media and rival fan feeding frenzy on us is going to be severe!
How can you saty the ref did OK. He was useless. If he had done that to you we would never hear the end of it
I agree. I’m not going to say he was biased, because I don’t think he was, but like you, it’s the inconsistency. Some players he was quick to pull a yellow for, but others got away with it the whole game. This season has been the worst refereeing in think I’ve seen in the PL. you just don’t know what referees are going to do through tour the game, and in their next game. Take Michael Oliver who once had Joe Hart square up to him and put his forehead against his with the intent there for an actual headbutt. Hart gets a yellow card. Yet he gives Buffon a straight red in the CL 1/4 final for being a bit annoyed with him that he’s giving away a penalty in the dying seconds, in his last ever season.
Of course, if we started doing that it would likely be the focus of discussion on MOTD, even though there's hours of other teams doing the same thing left on the cutting room floor every season.
Have you considered that as professionals who play the game and know the rules they might just agree with the ref? You even have a Scouser on here telling you the ref was OK, now that's bad if a even they can see it and you can't
Oh yeah they’re literally foaming at the mouth now. Talk of player exoduses and the end of our team. The haters will be queuing up!
If you win, it's game management. The winner writes the story and who cares if they wasted 10 minutes? They won
Im not disputing it’s not the players as well, but it doesn’t help when the manager plants that seed of “meh” about the competition in the players minds. It’s bound to affect them psychologically if they don’t feel it’s a priority for the manager:
We’ve got quite good at diving, apparently. Need to get better at shirt pulling, feigning injuries, not kicking the ball out when someone is down, time wasting on substitutions, as well as several other acts of sportsmanship.
When two teams of similar abilities play a semi final it's a 50 50 chance who wins. The number of chances was about the same for each side. The main difference was that when we split them in the first half and had Eriksen free on the right he misshit his shot whereas Herrera's was better hit and Vorm was unsighted. I'm not sure what the players or the manager should have done differently to change that.
I really hope not.....but the fact that neutrals thought the ref had a good game when the team doing all that were barely penalised is another illustration of what is wrong with football. It's supposed to be a sport. The sanctions for breaking the rules should always lead to a worse outcome for the offending side. As things stand cheats prosper. But if the only way to win is cheating then I'd prefer us to lose
I think the problem is we're not very good at diving. Hence we're not getting penalties but racking up yellow cards. In 2015/16 we became a different team. We knocked players over, committed some cynical fouls and started to get results. If you look at the teams that close out wins of competitions, they'll do whatever it takes to get over the line. Mourinho's teams have done it since he cheated Celtic out of the UEFA League final in 2003. It ain't pretty but it sure works. At some point we'll have to make that choice. Are we prepared to be nasty enough to win?
BBC miss the ****ing point as usual in their haste for a narrative.... ‘Questions must also be asked of Pochettino's decision to persist with Michel Vorm in goal and keep first-choice Hugo Lloris on the bench. It is harsh to place defeat solely at Vorm's door but he certainly could have done better with Herrera's winner.’ Vorm was not the reason we lost today. He wasn’t at fault with their equaliser or winner - both I’m afraid we’re at Ben Davies door if anyone.......
