Are we powderpuff? Discuss

[CanaryChris 146]

Thought rotherham gave us a good game actually. That ajeyi is one heck of a unit. If the Millers play like that against lesser teams they will find joy and probably will stay up. Good luck to them.

Edited March 17, 2019 by CanaryChris

[kick it off 1,948]

I like Rotherham and hope they stay up. Ajayi seems determined to keep them up singlehandedly tbf. I thought they were well drilled, tidy on the ball and played some good stuff at times. As others have said, they lacked quality in the final third which i guess is probably why theyre where they are in the table but they gave us a game and made it hard for us.

In terms of us being powderpuff, i dont think we are. We go down under contact largely and we draw a lot of contact because we play such fluid football. We also have clever players who have a bit of nous and will get their body between ball and defender every time - thats not powderpuff, thats smart. Look at Mcleans goal for example.... if it doesnt roll in the ner, its a pen because he put himself between ball and keeper. Emi, stiepi, pukki and hernandez do that time and time again. A lot of teams try to kick us off the park and there were elements of that with rotherham yesterday, they left the foot in a number of times after the ball had gone.

The Rotherham fans were quite partisan i thought... they were screaming at Emi when he stayed down but he'd been full on rugby tackled from behind by two millers after the ball had gone in a ridiculous "challenge". Quite often they appeared to be incensed by pretty clear cut decisions too. They were livid the ref didnt give them a free kick at one point when he clearly had his arms out to show he was playing advantage as theyd moved the ball forward to the edge of the box and were attacking... it was a bit bizarre.

Do we have an element of gamesmanship? Sure. Are we worse than other teams? No. West Brom were pathetic throwing themselves around for a start. I certainly think much of this debate stems from the quick passing, teams trying to kick us and clever movement to always be in position to beat the man or force the foul.

Edited March 17, 2019 by kick it off

[Jonncfc 28]

Had a bit of “banter” with some disgruntled Rotherham supporters on the way back to the station who were scathing about our alleged cheating, diving and feigning injury.  I think that’s a bit harsh but, that said, we do have one or two extremely talented players (who shall remain nameless) who have a tendency to go down fairly easily and who then spend the next 10 seconds sitting on the ground gesticulating at the ref instead of getting up and chasing back.  

[littleyellowbirdie 2,511]

12 hours ago, JF said:

Speaking of salty, this was the tweet at full time from the clubs twitter page.

FT| Millers 1 v 2 Norwich.

 

The visitors rolled out all of the game management tricks in the book towards the end, which is a testament to how well the Millers performed. #rufc

 

I

 

We did roll them all out at that. Earlier in the season we tended not to and sometimes came unstuck. This is a welcome improvement. 

[Daz Sparks 1,151]

Haters gonna hate us. 

Cloggers gonna clog us.

[JF 694]

42 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

We did roll them all out at that. Earlier in the season we tended not to and sometimes came unstuck. This is a welcome improvement. 

I know we did, as would every team in our position including Rotherham. But had we been 2-1 down I wouldn’t have expected our official twitter page to have bought that up. It’s part of the game and smacks of sour grapes, like the majority of their fans comments since the game and the ridiculous Rotherham commentators during it

[Thirsty Lizard 3,155]

So, just watched the highlights again. In the build up to the Rotherham goal Buendia is quite clearly having his arm - and then his shirt - pulled by the Rotherham player. Referee about 10 yards away looking right at it gives nothing. 

[wcorkcanary 4,329]

Although I have no problem with our recent 'game management' , I'd much prefer to pack the midfield for the last 5 mins or so and just knock the ball around, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a losing team chase the ball to the sound of Olé! Olé! Olé. There is something very confident and triumphant about it. 

[Chelm Canary 404]

15 hours ago, Herman said:

millerrafe, a small passage pf play. 5 attempted fouls. 1 foul. It looks like players getting frustrated by better players.

 

Given that Millerrafe ignored this post demonstrates that he doesn't call it as he see's it. Only seeing what he wants to see would be more accurate. 

Edited March 17, 2019 by Chelm Canary

[littleyellowbirdie 2,511]

5 hours ago, JF said:

I know we did, as would every team in our position including Rotherham. But had we been 2-1 down I wouldn’t have expected our official twitter page to have bought that up. It’s part of the game and smacks of sour grapes, like the majority of their fans comments since the game and the ridiculous Rotherham commentators during it

Yup. To be frank, Norwich likes to play football and it play it pretty well at the moment. Teams like Rotherham foul a lot to disrupt that, so it's fair enough that the players just make sure the referee knows about it. Don't see how anyone can complain about that, so long as you're not actually simulating, which I've never seen from our players. 

[SwindonCanary 455]

This was posted on the Rotherham forum.

Proud of the effort the lads put in yesterday, and one of our better footballing performances too. Now onto Norwich's antics which have most people irate: firstly Norwich played some of the best football I've seen this season, but that just makes it sadder that they felt the need to resort to such a level of cheating against a team in the bottom three. Don't get me wrong, they're not the first team to behave like this- i get the impression that, while we are practicing running and taking set pieces at least half of the league are practicing throwing themselves on the floor. It's just that teams like Norwich shouldn't need to - so it's probably fitting that they will go up as the poster boys for the ludicrous charade that top flight football has become in this country. Someone recently posted on millers mad that football is becoming like the wrestling i grew up watching in the eighties. Couldn't have put it better myself, as Norwich's sea of yellow almost resembled.. erm.. giant haystacks. (Sorry). I can't help thinking that our ancestors wouldn't have cut much coal if they had taken yesterday's canaries down the pit with them to check for gas, they'd have been playing dead in the bottom of the cage at the first whiff of scent of a real man. Now, onto the referee. Referees have a very difficult job with the amount of tv scrutiny they now come under with every game televised, combined with the afore mentioned plethora of cheating. I've often defended them in the past when match of the day pundits criticise the ref for not spotting a perfectly executed dive and i'd say "no, blame the cheat". But come on, it's getting silly now. In recent Millers games we're not witnessing perfectly executed dives, we're witnessing a farce that is bringing the game into disrepute. The number of times a fair challenge or non challenge was penalised yesterday was ridiculous, combined with the fouls that were committed against us and not given. I grew up watching football where referees blew for fouls. Often the crowd disagreed with the decisions, some of which were actually wrong. But this season i appear to have seen a rule change : referees no longer blow for fouls, they blow for players going to the ground. If a player falls over and feigns temporary agony, it's deemed a foul whether he was impeded or not, if he makes an attempt to stay on his feet it's no foul. If he rolls half way around tge pitch after a challenge it's a card, if is felled but jumps straight back up it's not a booking. It's lazy refereeing that is rewarding dishonesty and making cheating more appealing to teams. We seem to be behind the times in adopting play acting ourselves (admittedly with a few occasional exceptions). I've seen at least one post this weekend saying that our team need to join in with the cheating, and i'm sure many more are thinking it, which in itself sums up the sad state of the modern game.

[cornish sam 945]

I keep seeing this criticism from Rotherham fans but I've not seen any evidence provided for it. I can remember a few challenges where the tackler did catch the player or there was a coming together after the ball had gone where we could maybe have been stronger, but, there was still contact and there were plenty of instances where players could have gone down but didn't and plenty where the ref could/should have blown up but didn't.

[king canary 7,580]

Lets not kid ourselves- Emi, Marco and Onel are all the kind of players who would drive us insane if they were in a different coloured shirt at Carrow Road. 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

I think we have to take every thing with a pinch of salt. To me this is another one of those "I know we lost but I'm proud of my team" moments.

Rotherham would have looked silly and pathetic if they hadn't challenged us. They have a chance of staying up and must have feared the worst Saturday. But to their credit they gave us a game although as we have discussed on other posts, Pukki on another day would have had a couple and Hernandez missed a sitter whereas Rotherham battled well but didn't really look like scoring unless we handed them one.

And I think their fans are a wee bit disappointed that they played well for them but lost. Whereas, we know where and why we didn't score more. I certainly think our slow start again allowed them some room for confidence.

I think Rotherham niggled away at us and whilst there were no daft tackles they did lean, push, etc and gave away free kicks just to stop the game and break up the flow of our passing. And I think one or two of our lads got a bot frustrated and decided to make a meal of it if only to point out to the referee what Rotherham were up to. If the game had been at CArrow Road a few hundred Millerites would have kept quiet and our crowd would have been hounding the referee for their niggling tactics. But good luck to them, they have to do what they have to do to stay up. They are probably too good for L1 but will be struggling always in the Championship.

[It's Character Forming 1,160]

On ‎17‎/‎03‎/‎2019 at 06:26, kick it off said:

I like Rotherham and hope they stay up. Ajayi seems determined to keep them up singlehandedly tbf. I thought they were well drilled, tidy on the ball and played some good stuff at times. As others have said, they lacked quality in the final third which i guess is probably why theyre where they are in the table but they gave us a game and made it hard for us.

In terms of us being powderpuff, i dont think we are. We go down under contact largely and we draw a lot of contact because we play such fluid football. We also have clever players who have a bit of nous and will get their body between ball and defender every time - thats not powderpuff, thats smart. Look at Mcleans goal for example.... if it doesnt roll in the ner, its a pen because he put himself between ball and keeper. Emi, stiepi, pukki and hernandez do that time and time again. A lot of teams try to kick us off the park and there were elements of that with rotherham yesterday, they left the foot in a number of times after the ball had gone.

The Rotherham fans were quite partisan i thought... they were screaming at Emi when he stayed down but he'd been full on rugby tackled from behind by two millers after the ball had gone in a ridiculous "challenge". Quite often they appeared to be incensed by pretty clear cut decisions too. They were livid the ref didnt give them a free kick at one point when he clearly had his arms out to show he was playing advantage as theyd moved the ball forward to the edge of the box and were attacking... it was a bit bizarre.

Do we have an element of gamesmanship? Sure. Are we worse than other teams? No. West Brom were pathetic throwing themselves around for a start. I certainly think much of this debate stems from the quick passing, teams trying to kick us and clever movement to always be in position to beat the man or force the foul.

This is very much how I saw it.  The home fans basically seemed to feel they didn't commit a single foul all game.  A couple of fairly bad fouls in the 1st half drew yellow cards, correctly IMO, but they were still complaining that it wasn't a foul - and as you said, there was one point when the ref was clearly playing the advantage in their favour and still they complained !

 

The big thing is that if you look at where those fouls were committed, most of them were in midfield, and normally we'd just restart play by a quick pass.  So why bother to "dive" if all you're going to do is pass from the free kick, as a team we'd much rather keep the passing move going.  We had relatively few free kicks in threatening positions.

 

As for our "game management" towards the end, that was mainly just keeping the ball, sometimes near their corner flag.  I'm pretty sure Rotherham would have been doing the same if they were a goal up !  Yes, Farke did bring on 3 substitutions at short intervals right at the end - shocker.  Krul was a bit slow with goal kicks, but frankly I've seen an awful lot worse (both by us and against us).  It was all very standard stuff and nothing out of the ordinary.

 

I think the only time I felt timewasting was OTT was when Middlesbrough were 1-0 up at CR and their goalkeeper picked up the ball with no one within 10 yards of him, and promptly fell over "injured".  Just embarrassing.

[Woodman 92]

1 hour ago, It's Character Forming said:

I think the only time I felt timewasting was OTT was when Middlesbrough were 1-0 up at CR and their goalkeeper picked up the ball with no one within 10 yards of him, and promptly fell over "injured".  Just embarrassing.

That ended well the next time we played them at Wembley didn't it?!

[It's Character Forming 1,160]

Just now, Woodman said:

That ended well the next time we played them at Wembley didn't it?!

Was very satisfying 😀

[king canary 7,580]

3 hours ago, It's Character Forming said:

I think the only time I felt timewasting was OTT was when Middlesbrough were 1-0 up at CR and their goalkeeper picked up the ball with no one within 10 yards of him, and promptly fell over "injured".  Just embarrassing.

That whole game was ridiculous for that. Now I struggle to wish anything but failure on any Karanka managed team.