quote:Originally posted by MarkedMan
quote:Originally posted by daywalker
How you can't give United any credit is staggering, they've won 18 of their last 21 league games.
To win you have to learn how to lose gracefully.
Oh, puleeze .... spare me [;)]
Go back and look at how ManU fans behaved twenty years ago. Losing gracefully = losing, period. We've learned that much from Alex F over the last twenty years. There ain't a bad loss he doesn't find something worthwhile to piss, moan and complain about, and quite right too - give the team a good kicking, give the opposition, ref an even bigger kicking. Works live a charm.
You won't catch me trying to argue that Liverpool were the better side. Not with their record of screwing up allegedly easy games. They're clearly the worse for it. Which kinda means ManU were better, they did what Liverpool clearly failed to do. It was just a lot easier to take when you got beat by ManU at home year in, year out, dads vs lads style. This year, Liverpool did the hard work, and messed up the easy stuff. That's dumb. No intent to argue for a re-write of the league tables as a result.
I hope they don't take it gracefully. I hope they're absolutely effing pissing mad about it. Maybe they'll learn something, and actually beat Hull, and Stoke, etc etc, next year. Not score four goals against Arsenal, and go home with a draw, you know?
Actually think United's 2-1 win against Wigan this week was exemplary. That's how you play to win the league.
And good luck in Rome. Absolute belter of a city for a cup final, but won't be pleasant for you. The new mayor's a bit of a police state nut, and Roma & Barca are going to come out in force and cause trouble, according to the local police. Were you there last year? Be safe ...
Losing gracefully. I can guarantee you that every year that Leeds/Blackburn/Chelsea & Arsenal won the league whilst SAF & United were in contention for the title, he congratulated the team and the manager who won it, FACT as someone might say [;)] Individual games, sure, he'll do what he needs to do afterwards to pressure referees and opposition but come the end the season, he always does what's right.
The dropped points argument is just pointless tbh, it doesn't matter who you get them against, you just gotta get more than anyone else! Teams always have a bad patch, it doesn't seem to matter who you play in those bad patches, you just drop points. I remember 94, we got hammered by Southampton 6-3 & Newcastle 5-0 in consecutive games, you can't explain why (I think we tried to blame the grey strip for Southampton [:p]) but we still went on to win the league.
In the last 10 years, the team that has won the so called mini league has also won the league 6 times, that's only a 60/40 split so it's really not that unusual for a team to not win the mini league and then go on and take the title. It was just that before this year it only happened once in the previous 5 years, that's what SKY and the press concentrated on rather than the bigger picture. Those stats are just daft, you can make them mean whatever you want if you look over a certain period of time.
As for the Roma & Barca fans teaming up it really doesn't concern me. There's no history of trouble between United and Barcelona. The Roma boys won't dare come out to play with 19.5k United fans with tickets and probably another 5-10k travelling without tickets. We heard the same stories for Moscow last year with rival fans coming out looking for us, Russian police looking to kick the life out of us and extort all our money from us. Guess what happened, nothing, no trouble with other fans, no trouble with police, everyone got on, the police just wanted us in & out with no trouble as they do for all big finals. The 'local press' also claim Lazio ultras will be teaming up with the United 'Men In Black', more rubbish from the press. I've been to enough football matches home and abroad to know how to stay away from any bother anyway but I'm seriously not worried about anything going on in Rome, I'm just gonna enjoy the trip. [:)]
It all kicked off in Rome in 2007, we've all seen that. Last year when we played each other again nothing happened, infact the Roma ultras held up banners saying 'Free the United 4' in reference to the United lads who were stupid enough to walk across the Rome bridge the year before, got stabbed, had a fight and got arrested and jailed in Italy, idiots that they were [ii]
