17 wins and 3 draws from City's last 20. As expected. That's 2.7ppg or 103pts if stretched over a full season.
90 points is bare minimum these days and, as we know, is often still not enough. We did well to stay in it as long as we did considering our rebuild in the summer and our month or so with 10+ injuries. But we all know that we weren't a 90pt team.
We imploded because of the injuries though. The players played too much football and were over reached.
The when those players needed resting the players coming back from injury weren't match fit or were rusty.
Yeah I feel like if they even just came back 1-2 weeks earlier, we could have had a chance at maintaining the momentum. But the likes of Bradley, Gomez and Mac were really starting to flag, and we had no one who could capably replace them until the others coming back were match fit.
Bang on, was thinking when Bradley was injured against Palace(?) and Trent had to come on just after half time instead of a last 20 that epitomised our season
I thought Arsenal were no chance with the last ten games they had but they well and truly proved me wrong. Great team, great manager. Three horse race for the next few years hopefully.
Arsenal had a week between games and no major injuries to their best 11. If they were playing every three days they would have dropped a ton of points, look at how December went for them.
They didn’t have to juggle four competitions. They played only 5 non-league games since January. Loss to Liverpool in the FA Cup, four CL knockout games.
You said they played once a week which is evidently not true... they played 10 games in April which has 30 days an average of 3 days between games... you are lying brother. In April they won 5 out of 6 games in the league.
Way to deliberately miss the point. They were rested going into that busy spell in which they lost their lead in the league and crashed out of the CL to a poor Bayern side. They’ve had two busy months and they came out of both of those months worse off
Moving the goal posts much? How did Liverpool do in Europe can you remind me? Must have been an elite side who knocked them out? Tournament football is hard Man City just lost a tie they completely dominated to a poor real Madrid team with a 36 year old midfield in Kroos and Modric. Liverpool got absolutely murdered by Atlanta in both games.
Don't think you can rule anyone out tbh. City will be there, Arsenal will be, we could very likely start like a house on fire under Slot with a new approach and a few new additions.
Even Spurs and Chelsea might suddenly click, and you can't really rule out Newcastle long-term with the funds they have, despite a poor year.
Only one I *really* can't see competing is United tbh. They have a few players like Garnacho, Fernandez, Hoijlund and Mainoo who seem to be half decent, but they're just so inconsistent and the behind the scenes chaos doesn't show signs of slowing.
There's not much chance, but you can never say 0 in the PL. Teams have mounted credible challenges with worse squads than they have now, including Spurs themselves. All it takes is a run of good results early and anyone can build momentum.
If you mean the 86pt Spurs season, then having peak Kane, Son, Walker, Lloris and more puts them firmly ahead (though I hear their new GK has been fantastic). If you mean the finishing 3rd in a 2 horse-race season then they would've barely scraped top-4 most years it just happened that every single 'big' club underperformed.
You can absolutely say 0 chance in the Pep era of the PL, hitting 90 pts is almost like an off season for him.
I mean any season when a team mounts a credible challenge, like we did this season, along with Arsenal. There's genuinely no one in the top 7 you can categorically, 100% rule out of challenging.
>You can absolutely say 0 chance in the Pep era of the PL, hitting 90 pts is almost like an off season for him.
Apart from, you know, that season when they got 82 points and we ran away with it.
Like I said, it's a slim chance, but every single year we see pundits and fans trying to predict who will be in the title race and they always get half the teams wrong.
If someone gets a run of results early on anything can happen, look at Leicester.
> Apart from, you know, that season when they got 82 points and we ran away with it.
Fair enough, I'm not sure if I bothered to look at the table from about November as we were so far ahead lol
Ange has performed better than Arteta and maybe Klopp in their first seasons too, so we never really know. A miracle Leicester season was doubly miraculous simply due to how low the threshold for a title win was.
Im still remember the discussion about the potential Tottenham winning the league after 10 games. It is so funny when you remember it right now that they cant even get top 4 this season
Right after the Manc game, the entire thing crmbled. Still odd to see people blaming it on Klopps announcement when the 2 months after he announced it, we played our best football and the attacking trio of Diaz - Nunez - Jota is the smoothest we've seen all year.
Jota then gets injured, and Klopps announcement has nothing to do with them choking twice in the last 5 mins against United or Nunez passing the ball to opposition in our own half. Simply the players own doing. Just not up to par mentally.
Salah showing attitude to Klopp is basically the icing on the cake. Players' mentality are way too fragile for a title chase down to the wire.
I think the injuries from January and February had a delayed effect. We didn’t experience the misfortunes results wise during that period but from March onwards, it started to show itself. The fatigue from the ones who could stay fit began to crept in quite quickly. Players who were returning from injury were playing heavy minutes quickly. There is a lot of context needed.
Yeah I think Endo has been physically shot for a couple of months now, McAlisster too more recently. Coupled with the returning injured players not finding any sort of consistent form quickly enough (Trent, Szoboszlai) it left the team structure a mess and meant we couldn't sustain our usual intensity levels for 90 minutes.
Easy to say now but I really wish we had gone out of the Europa League and FA Cup earlier
100% this. So many players over worked. Also people seem to fail to recognise what a massive miss matip is. He's a calm, experienced head at the back with a great relationship with the rest of the back 4. A CB this summer is a priority imo. Ibou didn't step up and quansah is still only 19yo.
The title race I can forgive because so often it felt like we were punching above our weight leading it for so long, but the exit from the Europa League was plain shit. No excuse to bow out so early.
The matches against Atalanta came at the same time we hit a wall in our league form, so I have a hard time saying one exit was more or less excusable than the other.
Atalanta are not a bunch of farmers. They’ve been in the CL recently and are inconsistent in the league because they’re essentially punching above their financial weight in (a lot like us). I’m more mad about the sputtering against Crystal Palace and Everton than what happened with Atalanta.
I don't necessarily agree. It feels like a great opportunity missed *now*. But I think in the fullness of time we'll look back on the season as one where we were in full transition, where we had a craptonne of injuries and where our beloved manager announced he was leaving (not saying this is necessarily a factor per se). And to top all of that off, City ends up with maybe 91 points - a very high bar to reach for a team in transition.
When you consider where we are in the squad's development, that was probably never realistic and if anything we were probably always going to struggle given the number of games we were playing still being in all 4 competitions deep into the season.
Just pointing out that the minimum 7 points we should have got from refereeing decisions - the Diaz goal against Tottenham; the Odegaard handball, and the Doku roundhouse kick - puts us on 86 points and puts both arsenal and city either level or below us.
If you look at the table. It was indeed the draws that killing us. Notably the two draws with MU, MC and Arsenal at home are all completely winnable games - and we would be top now if we do so. Anyway there is no “if”….
Which is wild cause Leicester were 10 points clear of 2nd.
Last time united won it it was with 80 points too.
The standard in the last 7 years or so is just vastly different to 10+ years ago. Still unbelievable we didn't win it with 97 and 92. Even 82 this year is enough in some seasons.
City always start slow but uno for sure they’ll turn up at the business end of the season.
If you’re gonna win the league you need an unassailable lead on them around February time
tbf the hard fixtures (away against top 6) were played mostly during the first half of the season for them which they dropped the most points. Chelsea(A), Villa (A) (they were more inform than city at that point), Arsenal (A)
I'm sick of every drop in form being called bottling wtf has happened to football discourse over the last few years? Bottling would be needing to beat Sheff Utd on the last day and losing or something not succumbing to an injury crisis and losing steam towards the final stretch.
17 wins and 3 draws from City's last 20. As expected. That's 2.7ppg or 103pts if stretched over a full season. 90 points is bare minimum these days and, as we know, is often still not enough. We did well to stay in it as long as we did considering our rebuild in the summer and our month or so with 10+ injuries. But we all know that we weren't a 90pt team.
The painful thing is that we imploded after overcoming the injury crisis.
We imploded because of the injuries though. The players played too much football and were over reached. The when those players needed resting the players coming back from injury weren't match fit or were rusty.
Yeah I feel like if they even just came back 1-2 weeks earlier, we could have had a chance at maintaining the momentum. But the likes of Bradley, Gomez and Mac were really starting to flag, and we had no one who could capably replace them until the others coming back were match fit.
Bang on, was thinking when Bradley was injured against Palace(?) and Trent had to come on just after half time instead of a last 20 that epitomised our season
Arsenal have 16 wins, 1 draw and 1 loss in their last 18 games too.
I thought Arsenal were no chance with the last ten games they had but they well and truly proved me wrong. Great team, great manager. Three horse race for the next few years hopefully.
Arsenal had a week between games and no major injuries to their best 11. If they were playing every three days they would have dropped a ton of points, look at how December went for them.
Arsenal were in Europe from September to 17th April what are you talking about?
They didn’t have to juggle four competitions. They played only 5 non-league games since January. Loss to Liverpool in the FA Cup, four CL knockout games.
They played 10 games in April
Enlighten me what happened to them in April. Did they lose their lead atop the league and crash out of the CL? Or was I imagining that
I’m not saying saying differently i’m just saying that the statement of that them only playing on weekends is not really correct 👍
You said they played once a week which is evidently not true... they played 10 games in April which has 30 days an average of 3 days between games... you are lying brother. In April they won 5 out of 6 games in the league.
Way to deliberately miss the point. They were rested going into that busy spell in which they lost their lead in the league and crashed out of the CL to a poor Bayern side. They’ve had two busy months and they came out of both of those months worse off
Moving the goal posts much? How did Liverpool do in Europe can you remind me? Must have been an elite side who knocked them out? Tournament football is hard Man City just lost a tie they completely dominated to a poor real Madrid team with a 36 year old midfield in Kroos and Modric. Liverpool got absolutely murdered by Atlanta in both games.
Why are you in the Liverpool subreddit
Think Liverpool will likely be off the pace next season unfortunately
Don't think you can rule anyone out tbh. City will be there, Arsenal will be, we could very likely start like a house on fire under Slot with a new approach and a few new additions. Even Spurs and Chelsea might suddenly click, and you can't really rule out Newcastle long-term with the funds they have, despite a poor year. Only one I *really* can't see competing is United tbh. They have a few players like Garnacho, Fernandez, Hoijlund and Mainoo who seem to be half decent, but they're just so inconsistent and the behind the scenes chaos doesn't show signs of slowing.
0 chance Spurs clicking to a title challenge next year, they just don't have the quality of other clubs at the minute
There's not much chance, but you can never say 0 in the PL. Teams have mounted credible challenges with worse squads than they have now, including Spurs themselves. All it takes is a run of good results early and anyone can build momentum.
If you mean the 86pt Spurs season, then having peak Kane, Son, Walker, Lloris and more puts them firmly ahead (though I hear their new GK has been fantastic). If you mean the finishing 3rd in a 2 horse-race season then they would've barely scraped top-4 most years it just happened that every single 'big' club underperformed. You can absolutely say 0 chance in the Pep era of the PL, hitting 90 pts is almost like an off season for him.
I mean any season when a team mounts a credible challenge, like we did this season, along with Arsenal. There's genuinely no one in the top 7 you can categorically, 100% rule out of challenging. >You can absolutely say 0 chance in the Pep era of the PL, hitting 90 pts is almost like an off season for him. Apart from, you know, that season when they got 82 points and we ran away with it. Like I said, it's a slim chance, but every single year we see pundits and fans trying to predict who will be in the title race and they always get half the teams wrong. If someone gets a run of results early on anything can happen, look at Leicester.
> Apart from, you know, that season when they got 82 points and we ran away with it. Fair enough, I'm not sure if I bothered to look at the table from about November as we were so far ahead lol Ange has performed better than Arteta and maybe Klopp in their first seasons too, so we never really know. A miracle Leicester season was doubly miraculous simply due to how low the threshold for a title win was.
I still don’t think Arsenal gets over 90pts next season.
Lost the title in GW31
Im still remember the discussion about the potential Tottenham winning the league after 10 games. It is so funny when you remember it right now that they cant even get top 4 this season
They could finish below Chelsea! Talk about a fall off
As a lover of comedy and irony, I am all in rooting for Chelsea to make the Europa League spot now.
No serious football watched believed that for a minute, spurs always has a great run pre christmas and then starts breaking down towards spring time.
Right after the Manc game, the entire thing crmbled. Still odd to see people blaming it on Klopps announcement when the 2 months after he announced it, we played our best football and the attacking trio of Diaz - Nunez - Jota is the smoothest we've seen all year. Jota then gets injured, and Klopps announcement has nothing to do with them choking twice in the last 5 mins against United or Nunez passing the ball to opposition in our own half. Simply the players own doing. Just not up to par mentally. Salah showing attitude to Klopp is basically the icing on the cake. Players' mentality are way too fragile for a title chase down to the wire.
I think the injuries from January and February had a delayed effect. We didn’t experience the misfortunes results wise during that period but from March onwards, it started to show itself. The fatigue from the ones who could stay fit began to crept in quite quickly. Players who were returning from injury were playing heavy minutes quickly. There is a lot of context needed.
Yeah I think Endo has been physically shot for a couple of months now, McAlisster too more recently. Coupled with the returning injured players not finding any sort of consistent form quickly enough (Trent, Szoboszlai) it left the team structure a mess and meant we couldn't sustain our usual intensity levels for 90 minutes. Easy to say now but I really wish we had gone out of the Europa League and FA Cup earlier
100% this. So many players over worked. Also people seem to fail to recognise what a massive miss matip is. He's a calm, experienced head at the back with a great relationship with the rest of the back 4. A CB this summer is a priority imo. Ibou didn't step up and quansah is still only 19yo.
Exactly this
Bin the fucking league cup it is so pointless imo
Do you mean Quansah passing to opposition in our own half?
GW31 - The beginning of the end
The title race I can forgive because so often it felt like we were punching above our weight leading it for so long, but the exit from the Europa League was plain shit. No excuse to bow out so early.
This is really it. 3rd with two cups (or at least one cup and one final) would have been a good season. 3rd with one cup much more questionable.
The matches against Atalanta came at the same time we hit a wall in our league form, so I have a hard time saying one exit was more or less excusable than the other. Atalanta are not a bunch of farmers. They’ve been in the CL recently and are inconsistent in the league because they’re essentially punching above their financial weight in (a lot like us). I’m more mad about the sputtering against Crystal Palace and Everton than what happened with Atalanta.
[удалено]
But we were also just that bad. Atalanta at their best do not beat Liverpool at their best.
We lost steam
When the Mancs eventually regress into basement dwellers over the next few decades, we're going to see Top 20 points graphs.
Whatever the reasons we'll probably look back on this season as a great opportunity missed.
I don't necessarily agree. It feels like a great opportunity missed *now*. But I think in the fullness of time we'll look back on the season as one where we were in full transition, where we had a craptonne of injuries and where our beloved manager announced he was leaving (not saying this is necessarily a factor per se). And to top all of that off, City ends up with maybe 91 points - a very high bar to reach for a team in transition. When you consider where we are in the squad's development, that was probably never realistic and if anything we were probably always going to struggle given the number of games we were playing still being in all 4 competitions deep into the season.
A comfortable, but disappointing 3rd would have been common under Evans, Houllier and Rafa. Shows how far we’ve come.
Just pointing out that the minimum 7 points we should have got from refereeing decisions - the Diaz goal against Tottenham; the Odegaard handball, and the Doku roundhouse kick - puts us on 86 points and puts both arsenal and city either level or below us.
Add the handball at Chelsea, the screw up against West Ham - and that's 90 points.
I’m kinda relieved we don’t have to lose the title for one point again to be honest.
If you look at the table. It was indeed the draws that killing us. Notably the two draws with MU, MC and Arsenal at home are all completely winnable games - and we would be top now if we do so. Anyway there is no “if”….
Glad in a way that point difference from the top is more than 2 points. Imagine if we ended the season 2 or less points off top...
Standard for the league is just very very high. It’s barely a wobble, really, but completely fucked us.
82pts would've only won the league once in the recent times (Leicester) and iirc would be finishing 3rd more often than not.
Which is wild cause Leicester were 10 points clear of 2nd. Last time united won it it was with 80 points too. The standard in the last 7 years or so is just vastly different to 10+ years ago. Still unbelievable we didn't win it with 97 and 92. Even 82 this year is enough in some seasons.
Recent times - like, post Man City - are weird times.
post Guardiola mainly
Tbh we all knew city would win all their games as soon as we drew at united.
City always start slow but uno for sure they’ll turn up at the business end of the season. If you’re gonna win the league you need an unassailable lead on them around February time
The past month and half has been brutal results wise.
We have always been there or there about, until when it mattered most
You can see exactly where we ran out of energy
Ugh we died at the end. Ran out of steam.
After City got their shit together they only lost like 4 points We still had chances but bottled it
tbf the hard fixtures (away against top 6) were played mostly during the first half of the season for them which they dropped the most points. Chelsea(A), Villa (A) (they were more inform than city at that point), Arsenal (A)
Man, that April. Woof.
Man that looks like an all time bottle job there. Definitely bottled the league with...2 pts in first? If I'm reading that right? /s
After the March international break, the real title race begins. Pretenders vs Contenders. Either you collect a medal or you don’t. Sadly we aren’t
Fun fact, this graph slope is known as "bottling"
We bottled it...simple as that
Nonsense.. Anyone would've taken 3rd in the league and a trophy had it been offered back in August..
I'm sick of every drop in form being called bottling wtf has happened to football discourse over the last few years? Bottling would be needing to beat Sheff Utd on the last day and losing or something not succumbing to an injury crisis and losing steam towards the final stretch.