Pre-match: Chelsea away

Promises to be one of the toughest games of the season. Chelsea coming back into form at the wrong time for us, Villas-Boas seems to have abandoned the high line that Silva, Nasri, and Kun would have loved to play against. Luiz suspended may favour them more than us as he lacks discipline and leaves spaces.

Would take a draw right now but the most important thing is to avoid a loss, a draw keeps us 3pts ahead of the rags with massively superior goal difference. We're in our toughest part of the season now and are doing okay so far (draw against Liverpool, beat Bayern, beat Arsenal in Carling Cup), plus once we've left Stamford Bridge on Monday night will have played all the top teams away in the league except Arsenal, with all of them having to come to the Etihad next where we are unbeaten for nearly a year now. Worth noting that United still have to play Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, and us away.

If we win then we really are rolling, we'll still have the 5pt lead going into the Arsenal game next week. I think Chelsea will be in desperation mode to keep up though so expect a high quality performance from them, and hope we match that. We've had plenty of time for the players to rest for a change and have another five days after that before Arsenal, then the ridiculous fixture congestion peaks.

 

The loss had to come, an unbeaten season isn't feasible anymore in the Premier League with 5 strong home teams at the top and banana skin teams like Stoke and QPR away.

We were amazing for half an hour then lost some of our discipline just like against Bayern away.

I'm not going to rant too much about the referee except to say fook off Clattenberg on another inept performance, Silva going down was a penalty, they had it on frame-by-frame slow motion on Sky at half-time and when Gary Neville says it's a penalty to City - GARY NEVILLE - it's a penalty to City. It's not just in our games that decisions like this are changing games and if they had someone sat up in a box who could replay a decision then tell the referee, it'd take 10-15 seconds and ensure the right decision is made. It would have been 2-0 if that was correctly called.

I thought Barry was fantastic and also I thought we played like champions when down to 10 men, they didn't even test Hart until they got the penalty. Unfortunately Yaya was very erratic and not good today which has been rare and you need someone like Yaya to control games like this. Milner was also disappointing compared to usual.

We must get a result against Arsenal next week, I'm a lot more confident we can beat Arsenal at home than I was of us winning today. Our problem next week mirror's Arsenal, both of our left-backs will be out so we'll have to move Zabaleta over and hope Richards is fit again to start on the right.