cityfanlee23

Max Verstappen special 😂😂😂😂

I'm slightly annoyed with myself because I have spent the last day or so livid with the FIA and calling corruption and generally talking down the FIA over the Sainz situation, and now that I reflect I think it's a bit more nuanced and it's annoyed me as I wanted to be angry with them Would be interesting to get some opinions on this. We know Sainz has been hard done by, he does not 'deserve' the penalty. However, imagine for a moment they decide to waive Sainz penalty as per the regular rules on part changes, and now Sainz goes into the race with brand new parts on his car with no penalty, why does Charles deserve to race against his teammate who now has a potential power advantage just because of a mistake made by the contractors who laid the track and obviously failed to test it properly? (obviously, the buck stops with the FIA on that) And say for example in practice next week, Yuki makes a mistake and smashes into Checo, and Checo needs a new part and then takes a 10 place grid penalty, how would that then be fair if he's also a victim who did nothing wrong but Carlos had his penalty waived? The difference is that both Sainz and Checo are victims but one was the track and another was another driver, but is that enough to punish 1 driver but not the other? I feel for Carlos a lot and I feel like maybe a 5 place penalty would have been fairer and a minimum of compensation for the replacement parts, or the other alternative could have been to allow everyone on the grid to have the option to replace the same new parts as Carlos penalty free should they wish? I appreciate in the analogy I gave there is a difference between a racing incident or a driver making a mistake compared to the track falling apart, but for the impacted driver there is no difference right? so how could you treat those situations differently without ending up with protests etc.

He's been a bit of a dick all weekend so far

From what I’ve heard drivers are confident of good overtaking opportunities, lots of fast straight and very slow corners to send it down, I wouldn’t be surprised if this track is in the top 5 for overtakes but could easily be wrong. There’s a few low grip areas of the track especially turn 1 so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few dive bombs tomorrow

Great quali in the end. Great to see Logan put in a good performance he’s needed that. I think ultimately in rookie seasons you should judge them on their peak performances rather than their consistency. Hes got talent just needs to turn up more often next year if he still has a seat.

Listening to Brundle commentate a lap is quite mesmerising, hes so good at it

Hamilton struggled all weekend, Perez again though, bloody hell checo.

Regarding Vegas there’s obviously a lot of issues going on but I think Vegas is an entirely different beast compared to any other track in the world and the sheer amount of disruption being caused and planning that has been needed was always going to throw up issues, the track problem for Carlos happens and it’s hard to test for this stuff regarding simulating the downforce I would imagine, it’s not good enough obviously but street tracks are not immune to it and it’s happened in Monaco, Baku and Barcelona before. I think a lot of the issues right now are teething problems that won’t be present next year as they learn. The Carlos Sainz debacle is just disgusting really and I really feel for him, he’s done nothing wrong and there needs to be an urgent review of these rules really. Overall I’ve been really excited by vegas, it can be cringe and it’s definitely more of a spectacle than an event purely for racing, but Vegas does it big and as f1 spectacles go this is the biggest. Track has multiple good opportunities for overtaking, hoping for a few upsets in quali if Fp2/Fp3 are anything to go by!

Just finished the first Ep of the Brawn GP series, recommend it so far it was a great first episode, captures the desperation the team had in those early months quite well.

Yeah agree with that, I think Winks may actually improve with a step up in level too, if we get promoted he obviously won't have the ball so much and won't be able to dominate the tempo of the game as he is now, but the time he does get on the ball if we go up would be more valuable to his skillset I feel, as instead of him getting the ball and recycling it sideways or backward because of the deep block ahead of him, he will actually have more space to play into in the premier league. So as strange as it sounds, I think Harry Winks can improve by playing in a harder league regarding the effectiveness of his contributions. He's been incredible at this level but I think he's got much more in his locker.

Yeah, I think this is partly what makes the step up to the premier league should we get promoted largely "unknown" from a tactical perspective because right now we are enjoying so much possession of the ball, if we go up, we will likely drop from 70-80% possession to 45-60% based on opponent. I think the level of opposition is one of the reasons we have so much of the ball and struggle to break down the deep block as they tend to just sit back and setup not to concede. So right now we are learning the foundations, but next season's tactical approach might have to change quite a bit given the opposition is much stronger. There is no way we will be "wearing out" premier league teams in the manner we are now should we get promoted. But with that said, premier league teams won't be sat in a deep block parked outside of their box so you could also argue that our offensive tactics might actually work better as the strikers and wingers won't have a sea of opponents in front of them all the time.

I think it's a different mindset approach. The only analogy I can give is when I talk to my friends about F1, I love F1 because it's a massively complex sport of strategy, but to my friends, it's just cars going around a track. When my friend talks to me about tennis I zone out as to me it's just hitting a ball back and forth, it's about being able to appreciate things deeper than the score where football fans often lose interest. Personally enjoy watching Man City play their football because even when they are moving the ball around and it's going sideways, they have a very clear switch where a chance opens up and they strike, whereas at present it does not feel like we press the button as often as we could and we tend to give the opposition time to position themselves which then results in us having to pass it around longer. (maybe in time we learn to progress it more effectively) As I pointed out on the tactics thread as an example, Winks has been incredible for us, this tactical approach works well for him, but of his 1400 passes this season, just over 300 of them have been forwards. He's got too much talent to be passing 5 yard balls sideways and backward all game, but that does not take away from how good I think he's doing and I'm not trying to simplify his game solely to 5 yard passes, it's just that I think at times our own tentative tempo is actually holding players like winks back from being an absolute monster. He's had 6 shots this season. It's an endless cycle, the slower we play, the more opportunity teams have to park the bus, the more they park the bus, the slower we are forced to play.

Agreed, I really enjoy watching Man City because they have the quality to make the way they play quite entertaining, the way we have currently implemented our take on the style is often boring to watch and often quite lethargic, this season if you'd have skipped the first half of every game you'd have barely missed anything. I don't expect endless excitement, but I feel the balance of dominating the ball and actually creating decent chances has been leaning slightly too heavily towards dominating the ball for the sake of dominating it. I fully appreciate what we are attempting to achieve and I'm not against it, in principle I think it's a good aim and I saw what Puel was trying to do also, but in the end everyone got tired of Puel ball for similar reasons, the difference is at this level we are winning.

I want to believe that it's just a slight language barrier/reporting issue, I don't believe that he's saying "If you don't like it then FO" but it does come across that way with how it's been reported

I think the promoted 3 are way too poor to be an issue, I think even if Everton finish 4th bottom it will be with a comfortable 7-8 point margin, can't see any of the promoted 3 improving much unfortunately. Everton going down would be a good punishment.

Yeah, I completely agree with this also. I've said to multiple others that I actually do agree with the logic of most arguments on this thread, I personally believe that we went down because we were not good enough but also believe Everton cheated, on top of that, I can't prove that if they had not cheated they would not have stayed up. I'm not making this point as a defence to Everton but I really believe all their signings made them worse and if they had gone back 5 years and not spent all that money they would likely be in a better position now on the pitch, but again I have no real basis to make that a claim. Hopefully, we can reach some sort of financial settlement.

More than entitled to your opinion, once again though FT is awash with emotion and not a lot of hard evidence imo. Hopefully, we come out on top of this particular legal case though as there is no way to change what happened. I hope you're right that we won't need to prove that they stayed up as a direct result of their breaches, because we can't. It's frustrating either way that punishments are always delayed since it's usually too late to rectify damage caused to others.

It was not meant to be a defence. It's simply pointing out that the burden of proof is on those making a positive claim.

Actually this a really strong point that I’d not thought of, we actively avoided spending money to stay within the legal limits, Everton obviously didn’t.

You could be right on that as the margins are so fine, and I think that’s one of the main reasons we will end up with compensation because of how fine those margins are. I guess the point I’m making across this entire debate is correlation and causation. going by the points per game, if we had signed Dean Smith a few weeks earlier we would also have stayed up, the problem is how do you prove that he would have won or drawn those extra games? On a similar line of reasoning it’s very difficult to categorically prove that signing doucoure was the reason they stayed up, because there are plenty of occasions where doucoure actually cost them points. Legally it’s a bit of a minefield but I think ultimately our case is stronger given how tight it was and will likely result in some form of compensation, but I wouldn’t be too sure about it.

And I agree with this assessment, the issue is how do you legally equate correlation and causation. With Tevez it was easy because of the way the deal was signed but with doucoure it’s less black and white

Just to make sure I understand do you mean that the 10 point deduction would have kept us up if it was given last season?

Good point but from my admittedly lacking understanding of the legal system, the Tevez goal is an example of direct evidence, where a player shouldn’t have been on the pitch and scored a goal to send Sheffield United down. Whereas for us it’s circumstantial evidence because there is no challenge over the legality of the players but only the funding used to sign them. So it’s not direct evidence which is why the burden of proof to prove those players kept them up is a grey area. To be honest I think we will end up with some compensation because it’s probably cheaper in the long term to settle something.

Also just to clarify, it’s not a “defence” to say that Everton could have been in a worse state as a result of the amount of money they spent, the league table proves they declined. But thats not proof in itself. The positive claim is being made by people who say we went down because they cheated, the burden of proof is on you to prove that, which is not really possible.

It’s just logical. Respect your posts and I do completely understand your point and there are some aspects in which I agree, but this is just an argument form emotion. There’s nothing tangible to prove it.