R8 vs Melbourne City | Sun 27 Nov | 7:00pm | SS2

They also did seven nation army which is what victory fans do.

Our midfield got completely dominated. We had no shape. Our link up play was atrocious. We could not keep the ball. Our passing accuracy was 70% which is a poor return. We aren't the worst team in the league but I don't think we have a realistic shot at top 4. Top 6 is still a possibility but we are behind the eight ball in regards to achieving that.

Just watched the replay after busy weekend.

How was that a pen for City? Absolutely dumbfounded at the level of refereeing.

Also, Luke Brattan, what a cod. We won't be forgetting such comments the next time you're in NZ ya bastard!

Need more Watson leading the line, something to change things up a little bit.

Thought we were at least worth a point from what is usually a graveyard for us in Melbourne. At least we've got a pretty average Adelaide side next week.

There is a common theme from our games so far and thats the crap refereeing we have had to put up with.That though is only part of the reason for our losses,would be nice if we could actually perform as a team and take the bloody ref out of it. We really dont help ourselves at times. Just how A league officals can say there isnt aproblem with the standard of refereeing beggars beleif.

Krishna has had 3 penalties this year and buried two... plus got the rebound from last nights one. Compared to previous years he's Kevin Muscat

He meant in terms of loading up the wing in attack. It's a tactical term, he didn't mean it literally. 

All this 'Wonderwall' and 'Stand by Me' Bullshark is just a poor attempt to copy You'll Never Walk Alone.

nope. that's how I heard it last night. He said they knew we'd load up the wings and cheat, so they had to counter that. Or something to that effect. 

I wonder if the FFA will do anything about that ref? Such as taking his cards off him for a month. I though he was doing an advert for a toaster the way that yellow kept popping up! Yes there was a bit of tugging jersies going on but that game was not a 9 card game and the one guy whom should have received two yellows and a red, did not get booked.

Sorry but source?

I'm googling but struggling to find cheat being used as a tactical term not meaning to literally cheat, I'll be happy to be proven wrong though.

apparently it was about pushing their offside line, not loading up the wings (I had forgotten the exact context). 

Either way, he really didn't mean it literally. 

http://soccerhelp.com/soccer_tactics_advanced/cheating.shtml

Gotta agree with this. Yes, it's not often we get the rub of the green in terms of officiating, But I think the Us against Them mentality that the fans, and even the players have adopted is contributing towards a losing mentality. The players don't look like they're enjoying their football, they look flustered and frustrated for most of the game. We lose focus and concede soft goals because of it. 

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I hate it when people start using a word which already means something in that context to mean something else entirely. It's like using "literally" to mean "figuratively". "Cheating" should mean literally(not figuratively) deliberately breaking the laws of the game.

Thanks heaps for that.  It fired me up a bit last night, not realizing there is another meaning for cheating, but that's nice and clear :)

I mean its a stupid word because of the other meaning to use in a competitive sport/game, but at least its nto what I htought.

I did wonder but then thought that maybe they didnt want to rock the boat and just move past that, which seemed shark but feasible to me.

To someone who didnt know the other meaning it has a very strong meaning which is what I took it for.

Didn't the commentators say that he hadn't reffed at that level for 5 years before these 3 matches?

I suppose the problem is that the standard is so low that he isn't even that much worse than some of the others.

You know something is wrong when the Australian commentators think we were hard done by. I dont think he was being personal, just being so inconsistent. How City did not get as many if not more cards is beyond me.

Piss poor reffing, but a nice distraction from our abject first half performance.

The real question is were we cheating as a tactic or are we unfit or tactically unaware?

It's clearly a tactic. Overload an area by sending more players than the defence can deal with. That doesn't happen if you're unfit (why run to those places) or tactically unaware (we obviously didn't get caught in other areas because we didn't concede anything other than a dodgy penalty).

That's what I figured as well, the pundants want to stay all matey matey with the players and so hardly ever call them to task. The last time someone did that was sack wacker and I don't think I've seen him on the panel since.

There is no guaranty that the player meant some obscure tactical term, he could very well have thought that the nix were cheating, considering how entitled city seem to be.

What often seems to happen when we play is we get a whole lot of cards for nothing early, and the other team gets away with murder. Then at the end they get a few soft cards for virtually nothing.

A cynic would say that the cards at the end are inconsequential because the game is virtually over and is just the ref trying to even things out so they don't look so bad.

It will be interesting to see if the ref is stood down for a game or two.

He's only reffed 10 games since he did his first A-League game 6 years ago...

The thing is it doesn't deter Brandan or Kilkenny and it penalises the Phoenix.

What am I missing here? That isn't what the link suggests cheating is. "Cheating" is not overloading an area when you are on attack but rather it is "a term used to describe players who do not follow the usual tactical pattern when defending.....Cheating is when a player ignores his/her defensive role and tries to exploit space left by the opposition attacking. The player will occupy the space left by the opposition attacking and wait for play to break down to exploit this."

I don't know what that definition has to do with overloading an area. Cheating seems to be when you deliberately do not follow the player you are meant to be marking. Then hopefully your team gets an turnover and you can switch on to attack.

My question is: if we were cheating then why did we never try to exploit our counter attacking opportunities? Surely, the point of cheating is to try to score goals on the counter? We didn't seem to try to do that last night. Instead, whenever we got a 4 on 4 we seemed to hold up the ball and allow City's defence to reset. It seems like only a proficient counter attacking team would bother "cheating".

Maybe he meant that he thought we were cheating as in cheating not cheating as in a badly named tactic.

The term was often used by pundits/ others to describe players positioning in Ange's Brisbane and Melbourne sides.

From what I can remember, it was mainly Durante or Tratt (and occassionlly Parkhouse/Fenton), that would get forward out of the defensive line and not retreat immediately. They would end up receiving the ball after a breakdown in play, already in-behind the City attackers in a huge gap in the midfield, they made some good progress doing this. I think they were able to do this as Lia and A-Rod were tracking and closing down the attacking players really well in the second half, and City struggled to get near our goal.

Ref was crap.  Utter crap.  Meant they could get away with plenty late on.  But we had a very bad first half and we just don't create enough clear cut chances with our style of play.

Hamish Watson seems to make things happen when he is on the pitch and I'd like to see him get more than 10 minutes.

Roly needs to play closer to goal. 

Fundamentally we have a problem because we don't score enough goals.  The three of Kosta, Finkler and Roy aren't really gelling or linking up.

Dura looks like he is about to lose the plot.  His ref baiting is pretty intense.

Parkhouse looks like the perfect type of player to have coming off the bench late on to stretch the game, especially in combination with Watson, I just don't get the selection of him at the back at all.  Tratt on the other hand improves with every game.

This was a better performance than round 1

What's your opinion of Fenton as a left back option then?

He got stood down for 5 years and has handed out 20+ in three matches while letting City play very cynically.  I don't think we will see him again any time soon.

Its interesting that the top two sides were given wins against us thanks to some utterly woeful referring and where both teams were arguably second best to the Nix over 90 mins.

That we need Doyle back quickly