Awful, 9/17/11

Absolutely disjointed passing all over the place! No "passing into stride". Embarrassing, in my opinion!

Terrible field condition, in my opinion!

Lastly, the "soccer tradition" of faking a facial injury is pathetic and juvenile and I can't belive that it's not "forbidden" by coaches everywhere!

Coentrao is not a feckin winger ffs. He either plays in LB or doesn't play at all.

Seriously, whats the point of this buy? Was it really necessary to splurge out 30 mil on this guy?

And why the hell was Ozil not playing? When will people understand that Kaka is a flop?

Khedira was great and I love how he stood up for his teammate.

Seppuku wrote:Coentrao is not a feckin winger ffs. He either plays in LB or doesn't play at all.

Seriously, whats the point of this buy? Was it really necessary to splurge out 30 mil on this guy?

And why the hell was Ozil not playing? When will people understand that Kaka is a flop?

Khedira was great and I love how he stood up for his teammate.

oh yea, u are questioning his buy now, when last 2 months i was bashing this 30 m for a player we dont even need for past 2 months and people were just sucking up to it. its just ridiculus.

OH and guys, if a player like contrao can play CM. imagine a more technical and stronger player like ramos will be in that position, but yea continue to discard my thoughts.

Coentrao would be a decent sub.
It should've been Marcelo up top and Fabio at LB if anything.
My mate(Benfica fan) said he couldn't really play anywhere apart from lb and i'm starting to thing he's right.

Ozil should've started. Kaka did alright in comparisson to the others.
And once sami got sent off it should've beem coentrao for Lass, Ozil for di maria and have him swap around with Kaka. Then by 70'odd it should've been CR7 for Benz to play CF.

Fu*k Mou got every call WRONG

And by the way the ref was alright, we've had much worse and still came up on top. Levante were simply better than us, even before sami got sent off.

I dont think our problem today was tactical, it was yet another psychologic breakdown we suffered. If we actually played instead of arguing we could have done something. The patience wasn't there.

thats why we need cr7 in the starting line up

Still early days boys. We aren't in tip top form in the past three games but if this is our bad run then I 'd rather it happen now than in the business end of the season.

Levante cheated their asses off, the ref had a shocker and we were not on our game. These things happen, it's football after all.

I realize in a league where you feel that your rival will win every game it looks bad if we don't win every game. But winning every game is not a realistic goal nor should it be expected to win the league. I'd gladly accept this loss of it meant that our "rut" so to speak happens at the start of the season as opposed to the business end of the season.

Anyway the decisive factors will be the classio's. That has always been the case and it will be the case now as well. In the long run our runs against the other teams will be similar. The classicos will decide this.

P.S. The way some of you drama queens react to one loss is really funny. If you want a perfect season go play FIFA manager.

it was tactical and it was physological and mou/reff even made it worse. it was like all the evil groups were striking at once to distroy the great madrid lol.

We lost because we're unable to get that first goal soon enough.
This is why first goal is very important.
With it, we can play with less pressure, another goal is just a matter of time, and even if no more additional goals, as long as our defense aren't sleeping, we'll still get the 1-0 winning.
Without it, we can't release that pressure, we're prone to become frustated (especially when the opponent drives us crazy), and just a matter of time before someone do careless thing (I hate to admit that we're such a not calm enough team when it comes to deal with frustating things).
That's exactly that happened in this game. With plenty amount of possesion & control in the first half, we're unable to create decent amount of chances and still managed to waste a few that we made. We're unproductive and inefficient. Then we became frustated, Di Maria and Khedira ended up did those stupid things that punished us.

Khedira didn't do anything. But I agree with you for the rest.

alexander mahone wrote:
Without it, we can't release that pressure, we're prone to become frustated (especially when the opponent drives us crazy), and just a matter of time before someone do careless thing (I hate to admit that we're such a not calm enough team when it comes to deal with frustating things)

And we should be working on that, if we kept on playing patiently and with eleven men we would have scored easily and put this game beyond their reach. It would have been a hard earned 1-0 most likely.

Other than our frustrated response, which is the big problem imo, I agree that Benzema going out was probably a wrong decision by Mourinho. He is too important a creative outlet, and much more capable of playing against teams which defend so narrow than Ronaldo is. Benz + Ozil are our key players to unlock tight defenses which play a narrow formation.