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**Official Other Games Thread, Season 2012/13**

Greg said:
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Good old fashioned Alan Pardew route one goal.
 
onlyme said:
Shearer talking bollox about Taarabt..all those arrows..I could not see anything wrong about AT's positions.
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The trick to watching football highlights shows on the BBC without going crazy is learning how to mute Shearer in your head. If you can just mentally block everything he says, you'll probably be ok. If his grammar doesn't drive you crazy, his actual opinions will. (According to some, he has a few worthwhile views if you catch him without a camera around, but on TV he's hopeless.)


Shearer was trying to say "a number 9 should be thinking like this", his problem though is a failure to process certain things away from what he knows. That particular analysis wasn't even that bad for Shearer, he just doesn't understand the qualities Taarabt has and doesn't have. If Andy Carroll was in Taarabt's positions, you could understand his point, but Shearer could watch Barca and then go on to advocate a "get 6 men in the box, launch the ball into the box and you'll have a chance of scoring"...

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Shearer was coating Taarabt earlier. Saying how he has talent but does not put it in as much as he should do. I wonder how our fans would take to him if we re-signed him. I bet a lot of our fans would love him, bit of a maverick, questionable effort ala Berbatov. Interesting how United fans were slated for not appreciating him. Do they have just have higher standards than us when it comes to effort/desire/insert cliche here?
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That's just last year's dogma. I might have tuned Shearer out when he said that, but I don't remember him saying it... I just remember him saying "number 9s don't stand around in space waiting for passes, they get into the box", which is true of Shearer's style of number 9, however a number 10 like Taarabt does actually stand in a ton of space rather than sprinting into CBs which would take him from a position of time and space into a position of no time and space. But everyone has said Taarabt has worked hard lately, especially in the Chelsea, Spurs and City games when QPR conceded 0 goals and Taarabt had to do a ton of work.

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When we had him, he did a ton of tricks and did not pass... At no point did he pass. He made Defoe look like Pedro. At QPR he has learned to pass sometimes and while he still occasionally keeps the ball for too long due to trying to beat another player, it's nowhere near as bad as it was. But the reason most Spurs fans wouldn't be overjoyed to see him is simply the volume of number 10s we have. Holtby, Dempsey, Sig, Bale (wants to play in traditionally the number 10 position), Dembele (bought as a number 10 and converted), etc. By the time Falque and co come back from their loans, we'd have so many number 10s we'd have nowhere to put them. The sad thing is the potential for goals from all those guys are quite high, but in practice most aren't going to come anywhere near VDV for goals, Bale does get goals but isn't a number 10.... Dempsey does technically play in that position but isn't the playmaker that true number 10s are either. So the people we're likely to use in that position aren't proper number 10s, Holtby is the only one of the three that does fit the traditional mould... My point is, where would Taarabt play? (Even off the bench. If it's between Dempsey/Holtby, Siggy and so on, they can't all go behind the striker, that list is going to become people vying to replace Lennon 60-75 minutes into matches.)


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United fans perpetuated "Michael Carrick, what does he do?"... Even a few years ago, United fans still asked me that. They are just used to seeing very good players in their teams. I think United fans did like Berba though, he scored a lot of goals, he got a bunch against Liverpool in one game, United fans don't forget that. He is flashy, has style and scores goals, that should win over fans. United got a better work rate out of him than we did, so I don't know... There are only a couple of things that makes me think they possibly didn't appreciate him as much as they might have.

Firstly, they had Rooney and other strikers scoring goals. (Plus when you look at Rooney, his work and everything else will make Berba look doubly bad. It's like putting Bale in a sprint with Bolt, Bolt would make anyone look slow in comparison. That said, Berba is probably the better finisher, better technically and least likely to kick someone and get a red card.) Although Fergie was crazy for taking Owen to the CL final and not even taking Berba, that was madness.

Secondly, fans in general seem to follow the opinions of managers when things are going well. (Not as individuals but as a collective.) When things were going well last season, plenty on here felt Parker was better than Sandro (when Parker was playing and Sandro wasn't). When things are going well fans generally think highly of the players that are playing and doing well rather than the players that aren't playing, even if those players haven't done anything bad. It's easy to forget... When it's obvious you're missing something, you might get the scenario in which an injured player is thought of as three times better than he really is. When things go well, it's easy to overlook players that are actually good, but just don't get anywhere near the first team.

I would make the argument that Berba won the golden boot without playing many games. United lost the title last year on goal difference.

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Oooh..aggro between Hansen and Shearer. Hansen accuses Shearer of being a hypocrite for criticising forwards for using their elbows when Shearer did the same.
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That reminds me of one of the few times that Joey Barton got slaughtered by the media for being right. Barton pointing out some of the things Shearer did, including that beautiful "I'm allowed to stamp, punch, kick and elbow because if you charge me, I won't play for England" moment.

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Wouldnt surprise me if CFC tried to nick Laudrup in the summer, maybe even AFC might go for him too
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There's no reason for him to go to Chelsea. He played for Barca and Real Madrid. If he wanted a top top top club, he may as well go there from Swansea rather than having 6 months at Chelsea and get sacked for having the wrong colour tie on. (Don't get me wrong, he probably would do better dealing with Chelsea and Madrid egos due to his playing career but still, no need to go to Chelsea.)

There are tons of good managers that Arsenal could go for and they would go there because they'd believe they'd be given time. I don't know about Laudrup leaving Swansea just yet for that though, but it's possible... There are many good managers they might go for though, so it seems pointless to worry about the good ones they could get... Wenger is such a mixture of good and bad that it's going to be really hard to call all the changes that'll happen when he does go. I'm not sure what to hope for there. Between his wage structure, his belief in horrible players, the money Arsenal might have to spend, the way Wenger tends to get more than the sum of the parts out of his teams and everything else, that entire thing is going to be very strange.

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He took a few wild shots but I thought he still played well after the incident
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It wasn't just that. Every Swansea player was looking for him. A lot of the time he passed the ball back, although he was clearly chasing the hat trick, it just messed up their style of play. I think they'd have got their 5th way earlier if they hadn't got the penalty for their 4th.

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I also think that being 3 - 0 up and playing ten men I'd like to think that the penalty would have been given to him. I don't think much of De Guzman as a person now. If it was 1 -0 and playing 11 men then I would have said OK De Guzman takes it, but simply the game was well won and De Guzman was being a bit of an arse.
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It would have been nice, however I haven't seen if he misses every penalty he takes in training. The entire team seemed to agree not to argue on his behalf.

I have no problem with De Guzman whatsoever. I think everyone came out of it ok. The team came out of it well, the manager came out of it well, everyone looked good in the end, even Dyer for his acceptance and so on (eventually)... Although the news fudged him over, said he didn't celebrate and such, despite him going over to De Guzman and celebrating with him.

That was the biggest game in the club's history. If Dyer had skied that penalty, Swansea would have lost momentum and Bradford would have gained a ton. It'd only have taken a fluke goal to make it 3-1 and nerves could have seen Bradford get back into the game.

Ok, none of that was likely, but why risk it? Needless risks in the club's biggest ever game? It wasn't in the last 10 minutes or so, there were 30 minutes left. If that was our biggest ever game I know I'd want a reliable penalty taker stepping up rather than someone who might sky it. I would have the mentality that nothing was to be left to chance... Thinking back to the way they rested a bunch of their players for the Liverpool match, Swansea had the same feeling.

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"Also would've been the first hat trick in a League cup final."
Didn't want to say that, doubt Dyer or De Guzman would have known that.
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Dyer knew that. He said so in the interview afterwards.

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Was quite surprised to see him taken off since he was on a hat trick, so I'm assuming Laudrup wasn't impressed either by his behaviour or by his play.
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Laudrup seemed to give him about 20 minutes to try and get the hat trick. There are plenty of reasons he might have taken him off. It could have been that, it could have been the team's playing style changed, he might have wanted to take him off anyway... There are far fewer examples of players being left on when on a hat trick in recent years anyway.

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Quick question - are away goals considered in the Copa del Rey?
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Yes.

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Anyway, the actual reason I started this post... I didn't watch the entire United vs QPR match on Saturday.

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I saw this, no one mentioned it anywhere that I could see. But the image is brick, so I can't see what happened 3 seconds before this, did Townsend mean to do this or was it accidental? The gif is no help whatsoever.

Match of the day and so on seem to have ignored it... I've been lazy and not got around to watching the football first of this match so maybe they'll show it, I don't think I have that match recorded in HD though. -.-
 
Oh, also about the cup final... Did anyone else hear Tony Gale's "come on Bradford, get us a goal" comment? He's supposed to be impartial, that was before 3-0 too.
 
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