10 men

Last weekend 3 away teams were reduced to 10 men (2 pretty early in the matches) and yet none lost. In fact City went on to win. Don't teams know how to take advantage of a man extra?

They actually say it's quite difficult for the team who are facing the 11 men, as they plan to play 11. Also teams tend to shut down and go ultra defensive when they go down to 10 men as well.

i think in all 3 cases the better teams were the one to lose a player, meaning that it wasnt as apparent the difference as the better team have better players to cope with the situation. think it would have been a total different story if it was qpr, wba or sunderland who lost a man

A red card tends to change the whole mind set of a team and the way the manager sets his stall out, of course having an extra players gives an advantage but at this level teams are so well drilled and trained that losing a man is easier to adapt to than at lower levels. That being said it really does depend on the opposition that have that advantage, it must be difficult for a team like West Brom who have set themselves up to contain Man city to suddenly change their own psychology to take the game to the champions when all week they would have been thinking about 'how do we stop this lot?'

Top teams are now very well drilled in how to play with 10 men - get two banks of 4 behind the ball and hope to catch the opposition on the break (as City did for their winner - scored from an injury time corner against them).

Heck, San Marino showed the other week how difficult it is to break down a massed defence - add in the far higher quality of players in Man City or Newcastle's team and you can see how it is possible to hold on when a man down.

In fairness, it probably helped City that they could bring on £65 million's worth of forwards when they went 1-0 down.

Mat wrote:In fairness, it probably helped City that they could bring on £65 million's worth of forwards when they went 1-0 down.

Oh, I don't know. Torres cost almost that on his own and I'm not sure he'd have made a huge difference given his Chelsea form