It was perhaps the most anaemic Manchester derby in a generation, with City far too scared to lose and United not possessing the will to wrest the game from the cross-town neighbours. Arguably the most shocking aspect of the match though: Roberto Mancini’s total lack of attacking ambition in front of the Eastlands crowd.
This coming from a side whose designs on the top four is both immediate and highly funded.
Criticism, especially in the local press, has been widespread, with Mancini taking the brunt of media and supporter ire for an encounter that promising so much and delivered very little.
Billed by some, although not the clubs it must be said, as the most important Manchester derby ever, the match failed to deliver either entertainment or a statement of intent. It was a night of frustration, claimed United’s ‘keeper Edwin van der Sar.
“City did not really come forward and leave their defensive position,” United’s goalkeeper said.
“They were clearly aiming for a point whereas we really wanted to win. They were so defensive I didn’t have anything to do apart from [save] one free-kick.”
It’s hard to offer too loud a Bronx cheer though, despite City seemingly settling for a home draw. After all, Mancini is under extreme pressure to deliver fourth place and effectively no more in the current cycle. City’s ten-year plan – accelerated to two with Abu Dhabi’s wealth on tap – involves qualification for the Champions League this season and a final bout of expenditure before UEFA’s financial fair play regulations kick in next July.
In that, Mancini’s risk was far higher than Sir Alex Ferguson’s, whose team has been so blunted by injury, illness and under-investment this season. United, as Ferguson said, never set out to draw away from home, even if the Scot’s team failed to take any risks to force a victory. To not lose was effectively each side’s mantra.
Yet, for all the grand talk at City, the preoccupation with Wayne Rooney’s – failed for now – capture and the summer heavy spending, there was, for want of a better word, so little ambition on show. One wonders what Rooney, watching no doubt from his Nike World campus base, thought of it all?
After all the 25-year-old Scouse striker was basically happy to ink the five-year £260,000 a week deal offered by the Eastlands club. Supporter, PR and Ferguson’s pressure eventually told – at least for the short-term – but Rooney’s head was certainly turned.
City is not yet among Europe’s élite despite the Eastland’s bluster, although Mancini insisted after the game, somewhat disingenuously, that his side is now “on a level” with United. In terms of playing resources perhaps. In mentality his side possesses a distinct inferiority complex.
“I wanted to win this game, but sometimes it is better to draw than lose, like last year. But we played to win this game,” Mancini claimed last night.
“I think it was a difficult game for both teams, but we improved from last year because we didn’t concede a goal in the last minute.
“I think that when you play against United, if you don’t play well and give them a chance to score, they score.
“We didn’t create many chances, but last season we scored against them and lost three matches all in the last minute.”
Yet City cannot hope to win the Premier League setting up with three holding midfielders, despite the recent win over Chelsea. It is now arguable whether Mancini’s side even intends to challenge.
Indeed, with just three victories at Eastlands this season, City’s problem will come when the opposition fails to be drawn out of its defensive entrenchment. Much, it could be argued, as the Blues set out to achieve last night.
That said, next summer will provide a pivotal moment in both clubs development. Should the Blues qualify for the Champions League one final transfer market splurge may beckon before the club must balance the books.
Certainly the rampant over-confidence demonstrated by the club’s supporters will bring pressure to bear on both manager and owners to deliver a winning outfit sooner than later.
Meanwhile, United may still find it a challenge to keep Rooney at the club, despite the apparent promise from Joel Glazer to release the purse strings. United, with £160 million lodged in the clubs bank account but a looming £750 million debt, has seemingly promised to spend big in the coming summer window.
Few with any basic understanding of the club’s economics believe that is a viable long-term approach. Indeed, if retirements, under-investment and debt further weaken United’s resources then City may yet claim the crown of Manchester’s finest.
That day is not now. Certainly not with City’s inferiority complex so vivid. Rooney could do worse than to heed last night’s lesson.
Good summary of last night’s tepid events.
I do think we went for it far more than they did. We were the ones playing away, too, which meant the onus was on them, not us, to push forward. For the first twenty minutes of the second half we built up a head of steam which unfortunately culminated in Evra being injured. The loss of both attacking full backs effectively blunted the threat we posed going forward.
I think we were unlucky not to get more than a point and, overall, it was a decent performance.
wazza can f-ck off for all i care
For all their spending, Bitters looked far from Galaticos.
More like Geriaticos scared of losing their jobs.. and all that money with it.
If Sir Alex was truly going for the win, he would have subbed Chicharito for Park, not Berbatov. The loss of both speedy, attacking fullbacks required that United’s creativity in the final third be augmented, not slightly diminished (I don’t think Hernandez is as good with the ball as Berbatov). Between them, Park and Brown managed to kill United’s best attacking moves in the final minutes with some unbelievably bad passing.
great point
If this perspective makes you feel better about the mess you’re in and the evolution that’s taking place…that’s fine.
But don’t ignore the facts.
1. Your not the only big game in our season anymore so winning against you isn’t the be all and end all. As you rightly point out, we’re after 4th minimum (and we’ll get it) and as your manager regularly points out it’s about a long season not one game.
2. For all the bluster about you having more ambition in the game, wanting to win it more, having more possession blah, blah. The match facts were:
Man City 48% Man Utd 52% Possession
Man City 4 Man Utd 4 Attempts on target
Man City 2 Man Utd 3 Attempts off target
Man City 8 Man Utd 5 Corners
Man City 10 Man Utd 12 Fouls
Re possession. Mancini sets up teams for games like these to allow the opp to have possession in there own half (hence the 4% split)
3. BOTH teams were more concerned about not losing than winning. You set up 4-5-1 to stop City (and in fairness did it well, esp Vidic) and offered very little in terms of ambition in front of goal either(that Kompany & Toure couldn’t deal with).
4. Like Chelsea under Mourinho the foundations were laid on pragmatic football. Not losing, creating a team system and establishing themselves before giving creative players a platform to perform on …watch and wait as Silva blossoms and 4th allows us the confidence(and additional talent) to do that.
// Man City 48% Man Utd 52% Possession
Re possession. Mancini sets up teams for games like these to allow the opp to have possession in there own half (hence the 4% split) //
Retard.
That means UTD had the ball longer than City. It DOESN’T mean that 52% of the time was in the City half.
What a fucking dickwankspazcock!
Everything you said in your post above sounds like excuses-excuses.
Mourinho set out “not to lose”? Give me a break.
And you say Utd isn’t a big game for you? Even when we were winning everything, City were huge for us.
At least you’ve got the tallest floodlights or whatever your latest claim to fame is.
COME BACK WHEN YOU’VE WON SOMETHING – THIRTY FOUR (34).
Unless Berbatov had not fully recovered from the flu.
In reference to the article, were it says SAF intends to spend big in the summer, I hope he is looking to bring in midfielders in the January window. I hope he is still not depending on Hardgreaves playing any major role.
HARGREAVES
I agree about the substitution. Berba played he really well in the first half (his control of the ball was magnificent and he tried to make things happen) but faded in the second and I felt he would have benefited from additional support from Hernandez. Out of Park and Brown, Brown was the bigger culprit in terms of atrocious final balls. As was amply demonstrated last night, all Park is good at is falling over, regardless of what apologists think.
No, going 4-4-2 would have been foolhardy, and Hernandez’s speed offered little since City were defending so deep. One front man barely had any space to operate in a box packed with 10 blue shirts, let alone two. Our 3 man midfield was also retaining possession very well.
What we needed to do was offer a long-range shooting threat, which would have forced City’s defense to come out a little bit, opening up some space and opportunity in the box. I almost would have supported putting Gibson on, perhaps instead of Scholes, but his passing and retention probably wouldn’t have been up to it.
A match where we missed Ronaldo’s versality — his threat from distance is exactly what you need in these instances.
Or Rooney… he can crack ’em in from afar.
Dejong,
crawl back under the stone from whence you came!! Mancini is a lemon and your club is filled with artisans like De jong who will never set the pulses racing. Your attitude to a home game was frankly disgraceful and rather than come out hear to whitewash it, you should be covering your head in shame.
Goodness me!
What a wally
Blah. blah… don’t make weak excuses… you were the home team, and you played rubbish football.
Isn’t that why your fans were booing?
Whatever… United fans were disappointed in a draw… and know, that we really should have beat your lot… but then… we’re used to beating your lot… your ground or ours.
To the bitter blue: why don’t you include the statistic which shows that united made more passes and completed more successful passes in your half than you did in ours. Check out the guardian chalkboard if you don’t believe me. £ 400 million later and you are still afraid of us. You can’t even handle living in our shadow. Now watch us rape you at old trafford and put you lot in yes your
(cont) place. Bloody typing on my phone ffs.
What statistics show is that we at least tried to win the game even if we couldn’t break the berties down as they defended well and in numbers. Offensively city played like cowards.
Mancini is a cunt and likes to play with one up top
So presumably Mr Man City, Tevez, would have been benched for Rooney?
Unless he figured out a way of playing both of them – but they’ll both wanna play central, not out wide
Then you’d have Adebayor sulking in the dressing and headbutting you in training for nicking his position
It’s just not a good idea to move there
To De Jong Goes Sliding In – My old man is a mate of that twat Gary Cook, and the twat himself says that Mancini has been warned from above about their boring style of play, so don’t give us that shite about “building a team on pragmatic football” just face it you are shit and can’t play the style of football we are so accustomed to at United. Also all that bollocks about watching Silva develop and blossom, he wants away back to Spain next season, and quite frankly who can blame him.
34 years
tbf, you are acting like a typical bitter….
Was listening to local radio on the way home from work and Mancini doesn’t think his side are good enough to challenge Chelsea and United.
I’ll bet that will go down well with the Sheikh.
I hope Mancini is still in the job when City come to Old Trafford. We will batter those delusional blue twats.
To be fair Sheeshhy, he’s just laying the ground work for January.
He’s working with mostly another mans team, and he’ll want to spend large to build his own team.
If the Oil Baron has any sense, he’ll stick with Mancini for a few years… let him build his team, and see how he uses it… otherwise, he’ll end up with the same problem with the next manager… needing to rebuild… and so on…
Mancini has already spent £134,750,000 (net spend of £127 million when you factor in sales)
http://www.transferleague.co.uk/league-tables/managers-comparisons.html
Mark Hughes spent more but the Sheikh will be looking at what’s happening on the pitch and wonder whether this City manager has the ambition to take the club where he wants it to go.
You don’t give 2 managers a combined total of £339 million so that they can lay the groundwork for the future. These Arabs want results now. No wonder they have more money than sense.
Yeah I think Mancini is doing ok, and I can’t blame him for erring on the side of defensive solidity at first.
On the other hand, the club has the players to be more aggressive. Even with Ballotelli unavailable against us, he’s still got Tevez, Silva, Milner, Johnson, Adebayor, Santa Cruz, so he can’t say he doesn’t have the personnel to be more attacking. It was pretty weak to put Johnson on for Milner, why not take off Barry, move Silva to an attacking mid, and put Johnson on the wing?
I don’t think he ever wants more than three attacking players, he’s just going to spend a fortune to get really good attacking players. Probably will have a Tevez-Dzeko-Silva front three after January.
What I think City should be really worried about is not their lack of attack, because they weren’t set up that way. What City should be really worried about is that we pissed all over them in midfield in the second half, the one thing that should never have happened with that City side. We beat them at what should be their greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
balotelli hart johnson and kompany are good players, that’s about it
You’re right Sheeshy…
I didn’t even consider a couple of those players.
Still… a manager has a plan, comes in, builds a team in his image, and takes some time to implement his ideas… if you don’t give him a proper chance, then you’ve just pissed on your own reasons for hiring him in the first place.
it doesn’t take a whole turnover of a squad to work out if a managers any good or not, mancinis not very good, they appointed a big name not a big manager
see spurs and juande ramos
Yeah, I had this feeling from the start that he wouldn’t achieve anything at City. I still don’t think he well.
I don’t think he is even that big a name, to be perfectly honest.
Doesn’t really matter WHY you hired him… you hired him… you bank rolled his transfers… what are you going to do? sack him after 1 year?
I know I’ve red-tinted glasses, but I just don’t agree with the commentators saying we were as boring and defensive as City were. The Guardian chalkboard heat map shows that we spent 57% of our possession in the opposition half, and we had more possession than them overall. In comparison, City spent only 36% of their possession in our half. While I missed the first half of the match, the second half was very one-sided, we just couldn’t penetrate. Just because we didn’t throw caution to the wind against a bruiser midfield all the pundits said would roll us over doesn’t mean we didn’t try to win. If more than two City players had ever crossed the halfway line in the second half we might have gotten seem decent chances at goal.
It’s a derby, they’re at home, and they’ve just spent half a billion quid on players. I think the expectation is on them to have a go.
dunno, if i were a player, i’d fnd it hard to respect a manager like mancini, with his silver hair and the scarf around his neck. his attempts to fire up his team on the touchline look lame.
That point about possession is one I made to the Bitter Blue yesterday. Funny how he fucked off after that – unless Ed banned him?
The consensus in the media is that we were better than City and at least tried to win the match, unlike them:
http://therepublikofmancunia.com/the-press-put-city-in-their-place/
The only people saying ‘neither team deserved to win’ are City fans – simply because they could never to admit to themselves (let alone in public) that, irrespective of the money they’ve spent, we are still light years ahead of them in terms of the type of football we play, our winning mentality and our knowledge of how to pick up results in difficult games.
In other words, they’re trying to save face because what they witnessed in mid-week was embarrassing.
City fans are obsessed with emulating United and too bitter to admit to shortcomings. Look how giddy they were when Sheikh Man Whore took over the club. They’re the same bunch who buy City shirts with “I 8 United” and “Better Dead than Red” on the back.