***fc copenhagen v city official cl match thread***

[blues2win]

1 point needed at Dortmund to win the group rather than all 3 after their surprising draw against Sevilla. If we’d won last night we’d have been home and hosed. Ah well. On to Sunday.

[salford city]

Grealish and Mahrez is not the best option as they both slow us down. Mahrez getting picked is odd given that Pep says he picks on merit. I don't think he does.

I think he does for the league with an eye on the chumps league. Sunday is no place for Mahrez to start we will see the return of Foden whether we see Grealish remains to be seen having played all game as well as Alvarez

[blues2win]

Foden Bernardo and Haaland surely nailed on for Sunday.

[Nick]

Bit weird grealish coming out of the team at the weekend when he played his best game for us before

Who plays Sunday along with haaland foden bern and kev?

[stupot]

Bit weird grealish coming out of the team at the weekend when he played his best game for us before

Who plays Sunday along with haaland foden bern and kev?

Rodders, Kev, Bernardo, Phil and The Viking all nailed on.
It's whether he plays Gundo or Grealish

[johnny crossan]

Manchester City’s exercise in trying to win – without really trying to win



Manchester City's English midfielder Jack Grealish reacts after the end of the UEFA Champions League 1st round day 4 group G football match FC Copenhagen vs Manchester City in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 11, 2022.

By Sam Lee
Oct 12, 2022

What does it look like when you try to win a game without really trying to win it?
FC Copenhagen 0 Manchester City 0 is your answer.
It wasn’t helpful that Pep Guardiola didn’t feel he could count on the big story of their season, Erling Haaland, and a couple of other extremely talented team-mates.

“Many players didn’t start today because they were exhausted, tired and fatigued, and niggles,” he said afterwards. “Erling didn’t feel good after the game (on Saturday) against Southampton, Phil (Foden) had some problems, Bernardo (Silva) told us yesterday he was so tired.”
Then it becomes about the players who are left and, just as importantly, what they are told to do.

Maybe Guardiola knows what to expect with Jack Grealish on the left and Riyad Mahrez on the right. They’re not going to run in behind the defence and ask questions that way.
They have been praised by Guardiola for what they do bring, including their ability in tight spaces, with taking men on, and slowing City’s game down.
The last one sounds like a bad thing, and sometimes it looks it, but it is valuable in this team and quite possibly what Guardiola wanted from the start in Denmark anyway. This was, after all, not the real quiz. Liverpool away on Sunday is.

City had won their first three Champions League games of the season, and this draw was enough to qualify for the last 16 with two matches to spare after Sevilla drew in Dortmund in the evening’s other group G fixture.

We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking they didn’t want to beat Copenhagen, though. They did, and the team Guardiola picked was good enough to do it. “We had nine points in our pocket and needed to win one more game. We played for that. We started really well, we cannot deny how we started in the first minutes,” Guardiola added.

But for a baffling handball decision, they would have had an early lead through Rodri, but his thunderbolt was chalked off by the VAR because Mahrez was adjudged to have made a deliberate handball. Still, a second baffling VAR handball decision did go City’s way — when the ball hit home defender Nicolai Boilesen’s arm from close range — but Mahrez missed the penalty anyway.

So City did want to win, of course, and made a good fist of it… until Sergio Gomez was sent off on the half-hour after a third VAR intervention.
By that point, it really was about doing the bare minimum to get the points. More important was not losing and, ideally, not getting too tired.
“Of course I thought about that,” Guardiola said when asked about conserving energy for Anfield at the weekend, before listing the reasons why some of his star men couldn’t start, and then stating, as he had done several times, how difficult it is to play with 10 men for an hour.

We can say that they wanted to win but without expending much energy because there was a shift in game plan in the final 12 minutes or so.
Guardiola said they thought they could “break it” by bringing on Foden and Bernardo.

Grealish and Kevin De Bruyne went off, and suddenly City were running in behind through Foden. He immediately started trying to stretch the Copenhagen defence — something which had been absent from City’s gameplan until that point.
Julian Alvarez, who had to go up against three centre-backs without any of his wingers giving those defenders something to think about (and no long passes in his direction) suddenly made a couple of darts himself as the visitors went more direct.

More direct, in Guardiola’s mind, usually means more risk: more loose balls, more turnovers, more counter-attacks and then a particular focus on — when you have 10 men and a trip to Anfield coming up — more energy expended. So why risk it at all? Or at least for too long, anyway.

The Grealish and Mahrez situation is one to keep an eye on.

One dressing-room source has acknowledged that the team can struggle in some ways when they play together because they don’t tend to make those runs in behind. They both started against Borussia Dortmund recently and that game was terrible, although Guardiola, in defence of Grealish, highlighted the faults of other players as well.

Sergio Gomez of Manchester City is sent off against FC Copenhagen (Photo: Lars Ronbog / FrontZoneSport via Getty Images)
Again, they bring a lot of qualities to City and when Guardiola wants a bit more control they could be very useful as a wide pairing.

That might have been in his mind here from the off, only for that plan to be ruined by the disallowed goal, the missed penalty and, most importantly, the red card. At which point Mahrez was taken off anyway and City soon reverted to a back five, in a bid to control Copenhagen’s wing-backs.

And so the second half was, by and large, fairly ugly, but it was what needed to happen.
Copenhagen were a completely different proposition to the side who lost 5-0 in Manchester a week ago; they battled and fought and took the game to City as best they could.

But Guardiola noted that “we conceded few” chances on several occasions, and he was right.

City had enough of the ball to kill off the opposition threat, but not enough impetus or desire — for the above reasons — to go and win it themselves.

And so a point will do the job quite nicely, but the target will be much loftier on Sunday.

[Beefymcfc]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

[johnny crossan]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

shall I just stop pasting his Athletic articles then?

[Mase]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

shall I just stop pasting his Athletic articles then?

Please.

[salford city]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

shall I just stop pasting his Athletic articles then?

Please.

Please from me too. Let's stop giving these goons exposure that they do not deserve

[john@staustell]

Inaccurate too, Pep would never say 'Bernardo was so tired...." it would be 'so, SO tired'

[johnny crossan]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

shall I just stop pasting his Athletic articles then?

Please.

Please from me too. Let's stop giving these goons exposure that they do not deserve

I've let him know your verdict

[Mase]

By Sam Lee

Absolute wanker. Noting more needs to be read.

shall I just stop pasting his Athletic articles then?

Please.

Please from me too. Let's stop giving these goons exposure that they do not deserve

I've let him know your verdict

Let us know what he comes back with!

[zuricity]

^^^^^^^^^

The reason i chose ^^ and not directly quoting the above comments is quite simple. I don't want to add further crap on the internet from Sam Lee.

The availability of the internet to all and sundry means that the "man on the street" can have his say ( i wont even mention Loretta).

For many years Newsprint relied on Reporters that actually verified the story and facts. "These days" ( classic Jackson Browne song) , it is no longer relevant, people just spout what they have heard/read , true or false.

This guy thinks he can make a living on tw*tter etc by telling us what we already know. Time to pull the plug on websites like Tw*tter, slabheadbook and instantoats gram.

I really don't understand why anyone would cut and paste all that crap , rather than link to it. Time to reduce the bandwith usage.

[johnny crossan]

^^^^^^^^^
The reason i chose ^^ and not directly quoting the above comments is quite simple. I don't want to add further crap on the internet from Sam Lee.
The availability of the internet to all and sundry means that the "man on the street" can have his say ( i wont even mention Loretta).
For many years Newsprint relied on Reporters that actually verified the story and facts. "These days" ( classic Jackson Browne song) , it is no longer relevant, people just spout what they have heard/read , true or false.
This guy thinks he can make a living on tw*tter etc by telling us what we already know. Time to pull the plug on websites like Tw*tter, slabheadbook and instantoats gram.
I really don't understand why anyone would cut and paste all that crap , rather than link to it. Time to reduce the bandwith usage.

Athletic links don't work, articles are pasted simply because otherwise you need a subscription to read them. They also have other writers besides Sam Lee (who does have his followers both on here and more widely among personages on the street btw)

[johnny crossan]

nearly forgot

P.s we might go unbeaten this season.

I'm glad you said that ....I'll bump it after every game until we lose

[Nigels Tackle]

question marks over the manager after that one?

he lost our momentum on wednesday
seen it so many times before
sorry hants, it’s 100% right to question the manager when he fucks things up by tinkering with things

[belleebee]

question marks over the manager after that one?

he lost our momentum on wednesday
seen it so many times before
sorry hants, it’s 100% right to question the manager when he fucks things up by tinkering with things

No. Gomez’s sending off lost our momentum. Anyway, let’s f*ck Pep off - he’s clearly a shit manager, Mr Surrey.

[Nigels Tackle]

question marks over the manager after that one?

he lost our momentum on wednesday
seen it so many times before
sorry hants, it’s 100% right to question the manager when he fucks things up by tinkering with things

No. Gomez’s sending off lost our momentum. Anyway, let’s f*ck Pep off - he’s clearly a shit manager, Mr Surrey.

it's not about fucking pep off belleebeebellend, it's questioning some of his selections.