Lord God Jose Mourinho wrote:
In the semi final of the FA Cup, when John Terry won the ball cleanly, got kicked by Milner straight after, was then booked by the ref and after the game had to put up with claims that he should've been sent off, you were backing Terry were you? Because I don't remember seeing anyone on here who didn't think Terry should have been off.
Of course it's all an anti-Citeh witch hunt. Nothing to do with two broken legs and a kung-fu kick through someone's chest in the space of a few months.
I have to retract what I said about De Jong barely winning the ball. The only angle I'd seen the ball barely seemed to move. I've just managed to see a clip again and he did win the ball and divert it to a Citeh play, so in that it was a "good" tackle. My problem with De Jong's challenges are simply that he goes in to take man and ball each time.
I never saw the Terry tackle so that rules me out of commenting on that one.
He is a hard player, the point of such tackling is to take the ball cleanly, and as per sliding tackle tradition, the crunch effect will see the opposite man hit the deck. If you've ever tried one or been tackled by one, that's what happens. If it's a great tackle, the man gets taken out of the game for a second or two and the ball has been played in a way as to exploit the space that's resulted from it (this is the bit that NDJ fails to do).
As long as the man goes down as a result of a fair challenge, that's football. I do believe it is supposed to be a man's game is it not, or do you really want to see the 'Wendyball' that many on this board refer to it as?
The City witch hunt is not just aimed at De Jong. The press are constantly looking for tales of club disharmony, putting the knife in on a daily basis, fishing for quotes from discarded players and even bloody medical backroom staff. Every last argument (the kind of which probably goes on every day at most clubs) makes the back pages and is shown as another glorious example of how 'mercenary' the players are and how we are lacking in team spirit; a team full of individuals, blah-blah.
The only time we did not make the headlines was in the couple of days after an eleven man solid work ethic saw us gain three points against Chelsea. Quite simply, some of them were gutted because it destroyed their myth about our players not caring about anything bar their wage packet. Delightfully for them though, Carlos Tevez had a minor disagreement with the manager the week after so they could recommence the battle, and despite being in second, the club is in crisis again.
