Pep Guardiola’s complaints that his team had not had sufficient time to rest after their Champions League loss to Real Madrid on Wednesday strike me as absurd.
What does he have a squad for? City’s reserves are better and better paid than just about any other EPL team. He should simply rotate his squad better.
He's complaining that his players are overplayed, when the problem is he doesn't rotate his (extremely expensive, extensive, and excellent) squad enough.
He could have fielded a starting 11 who didn't play in midweek and still have a better (and I might add, better-paid) team than most of the rest of the EPL.
Chelsea’s best player is one who couldn’t even get a game for City over the last few years. This sounds to me like a Pep problem.
Coventry robbed, undeserving victory for Man Utd
The biggest take-away from the second semi-final is that Coventry were robbed. And I say this as a life-long Manchester United fan. There was only one team who deserved to win Sunday’s game, and it wasn’t us.
No team that ships three goals in the last half hour deserves to win. Furthermore, Coventry were the ones who played with more purpose and passion in extra-time and were unlucky not to score three times.
Their disallowed goal laid bare everything that is wrong both with the existing offside rule as well as VAR.
It is important to look at these things in tandem, because the problem isn’t just one or the other, but both.
The fundamental problem is the interpretation of the law that calls a forward offside if one toenail is beyond the last defender.
The spirit of the game would be much better upheld if we were to simply reverse the burden of proof – as it were – and hold that if any portion of the forward is onside, then he is onside.
Or if that is too revolutionary a thought, then simply hold that in close/marginal situations, the benefit of the doubt is given to the forward.
If the latter were the rule, then there would be no need for VAR in the first place, at least insofar as offside is concerned.
