Our Mentality when things go wrong!

Tagged United as we are City rivals and they are also going through the most but this is going to be a bit of a Rant article before I make a few points about the way forward.

Just like the CL Final last year, after Wednesday's sickener, I stayed away from football for 4 days.Didn't expect Spurs to get anything last night but still watched anyway then had to endure 90 mins of torture. Fortunately, Liverpool coughed up 2 points just to make things easier for a group that must be in a really dark place.

It wasn't the loss but the nature of it. Just like the loss at home against Spurs. This team has it in them and sadly it keeps hurting them in the one competition they desperately want. For me losing that PL game against Spurs after drawing level on 90 was a sign of things to come. Personally, I was disgusted with the defense that night but sometimes you think they learn from it. I saw the same level of carelessness in Cancelo against Leeds where he was garbage. No real desire to protect the ball, avoid losing possession and making mistakes under NO pressure at all. I almost posted an article about it but decided to let it go.

Back to Wednesday, the Manager takes the blame most if not all the time. No manager in European football has dealt with the expectations Pep has.He can handle it, but can our players handle it? Even after last year's final was shocked how all the focus was on Pep and the players went into the summer unscathed.

No team has a divine right to win every final but DM or no DM City are several levels better than Chelsea. It wasn't the loss. The performance was bad. KDB didn't turn up in Portugal. I didn't see him in Madrid as well but no one will say it. And before anyone carps about the DM thing, we played the last 8 games of the 2018-19 season with Gundo at DM after Fernandinhos's injury and saw it over the line.

You can think and say what you want about Yaya Toure but without him, I'm not convinced we win the FA Cup or our first and second PL title. You just look around that group and only he could do what he did in those clutch moments to win the key games that landed those important titles.

Its the mentality when things are not going well. How does the team pick themselves up. This is the one area Liverpool is several levels better than us or any other team in England and we saw Madrid show it THROUGHOUT this CL campaign. Its not a once of. Even that team that won 3 in a row under Zidane wasnt really a great team per say. Some will argue it but we all have seen better.

For City, there are mitigating circumstances. Pep doesn't build teams to be 1-0 down or chasing games so maybe thats why they never quite know what to do when they go down, but neither does Klopp or any United manager. In Liverpool's case, they have a decent home crowd that pushes them when the chips are down and have slightly less expectations and therefore less nerves.

But I think the mentality of this Group needs to be addressed and I pray this season we get it right. We can play all the best football but we need to prepare better against other things we can't control such as bad luck poor referring or genius performances against certain opposition. We need to learn to rise above that.

I know Pep has worked on the team discipline hence few if not all our players don't engage in scuffles or incidents that can result in yellow or red cards (Grealish excepted). We have seen us cut out the last-ditch of the ground tackles of the Otamendi era. Now we need to work on these daft penalties we concede.

Continued.....