[LuisNaniencia]

Could list most of the players as poor performers, fact is one team was fresher than the other. Would have been a different game if we played Tuesday.

 

[Cantona in disguise]

Poor game, we really lose our flow when we can’t play our main XI. It’s a big concern.

DDG what can we say, he’s done. At 1-0 we were still in it, as soon as it went 2-0 it was game over. You can’t build a successful team without a good goalkeeper, and at this point he’s costing us games.

Not sure De Gea is done as such but he knows he won't get dropped no matter what. Drop him let him sit on the bench. Bring him back in next season. Form is temporary and he deserves a chance to show that. He's given us his best years.

 

[AbstruseAlan]

The lads really do look shot to bits at the minute don't they? Tiredness definitely a major factor today, we looked lethargic and sloppy all over from front to back. Chelsea played on it well, pressed us really well and forced errors.

 

[TheRedHearted]

Seemed like I was right calling to start Lingard, Mata, McTominay and the rest. Can't believe no Dalot.

 

[0le]

When we've been pressed in the last 3 games we've been pretty awful and it's really shown the limitations of some of our players when they aren't allowed time on the ball.

Whilst Lindelof and Maguire have (quite rightly) copped for some criticism, i think AWB has been the worst of the lot.

Yeah good point. But the mistakes by Lindelof and Maguire are typically the ones which cost goals so they are the ones we as fans tend to focus on more.

 

[Andycoleno9]

Wrong everything. Changing a system that worked was wrong. Resting players was wrong. And then you play that players who you were resting. Why?
When you reach 1/2 finals of some cup then you go for it.

I am fuming here. Just when i thought that maybe just maybe i was wrong about Ole...
We are new Arsenal under Wengere. Top 4 trophy is priority and everything else is secondary. feck that.

 

[Anekdote]

I didn't expect a win today, because I think, the race to top4 is more important than the FA cup this season. Also disappointed of the starting squad, most of them should be rested and start with the b squad instead.

De Gea's recent performance is shocking, Henderson should be given a chance to challange for the starter next season.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Let’s be honest, we’ve been shit since Southampton. The Palace result masked a bang average performance. Ole has overseen two excellent runs of form. The first one ended in a run of atrocious form that took him months to turn around. He needs to nip this current slump in the bud fecking pronto. He still has a lot to prove.

 

[Revan]

Really poor. Wrong tactics, bad individual performance, shocking goalkeeping, a big mistake from each of the two CBs, a nasty injury and so on.

The thing that pisses me off most is that not only we lost, but we also lost the opportunity to rest the key players. If this costs us UCL, then Ole should really be in trouble. There was no justification whatsoever to play Bruno for 100 minutes, and essentially no player got a rest. This could destroy our season.

 

[Siorac]

But that doesn’t make much sense given that we drew the first half 0-0 up until the injury enforced change in system

We were, however, pretty poor until that point, couldn't get going at all and that matters. That and Mike Dean gave Chelsea the confidence they needed.

 

[Irwin99]

Wonder if the Arsenal game yesterday tempted Ole into playing a stronger side? An FA cup final against them would have been a fantastic c chance for some silverware but Chelsea were much stronger than us.

On a plus note, although he didn't even have his best game, Bruno was still a different class. His workrate and creativity is exceptional.

 

[Cpt Negative]

De Gea could have done better for all 3, but that second goal adds another howler for the album.

Williams shouldn't escape blame for a criminal pass just before it.

That utterly killed any chance we had

for as good as we’ve been going forward, the goals were conceding are gifts.

since the restart, I can think of 5 goals DDG should have done better with

 

[Member 113277]

Kicked off the park, snide fouls, Chelsea knew perfectly well what they were doing, joke of a Referee....DDG throwing two in, Martial stonewall penalty not given at 0-0...disaster of a day

Agree with the fouling comment, think Martial was just outside the box, but the ref didn't award a free kick when it was clear martial was fouled.

 

[oreon]

First to blame is Ole. The formation was wrong and the team never found any rythmn even after making the changes.
Then De Gea, Maguire & Lindelof are second. These three have made mistakes that have lead to lost games. De Gea needs to go. And we need a world class CB next to one of Maguire and Lindelof. The partnership of Maguire and Lindelof is nowhere near solid

 

[Aretak]

People will (rightly) focus on the De Gea errors, but it was an all-round dreadful performance. Completely outplayed from start to finish and Chelsea deserved their win, regardless of how it came. It's all down to the manager's errors too. Wrong team selection. Wrong formation. Wrong subs. He'll probably be secretly quite pleased that De Gea will draw the spotlight away from his own failings.

 

[EwanI Ted]

Bad day at the office. Everything went wrong - picked the wrong team, players started off badly then never got going until they the game was over, De Gea had a nightmare, horrible injury to Bailly. Worst of all, Chelsea weren't even that great, we just gifted them the game.

Also, while I'm not into complaining about refs, how on earth did Chelsea manage to give away 20 fouls and not get a single yellow card?

Anyway, hopefully the team will just forget about it and move on to West Ham.

 

[Reynoldo]

Redcafe: we don't care about the F.A. Cup.

Redcafe: this is a disgrace we lost, Ole out and [insert players names here] are not good enough.

it would be funny if it wasn’t so predictable

 

[U99ted]

Shit performance. Chelsea were better but didn't get any cards for their persistent fouls. Onto the last 2 PL games & Europa.

 

[mazhar13]

Too many people are being influenced by what the BBC are telling them rather than thinking for themselves, I think.

 

[Revan]

21 fouls. 0 yellow cards. Amazing.

Not really. There was not a single hard challenge (except possibly Zouma on Martial, but that was missed from the referee). There is no 3 fouls and a yellow rule in football.

 

[Bilbo]

@Sassy Colin has summed it up. Bad day at the office. Move on

We went 19 unbeaten. Today we lost to a good side that played better on the day. We'd talked about the advantage that they had the way the fixtures fell, and whilst this sounds like an excuse, it isn't, but you could see it on the pitch. They looked sharper from the kick off.

Remember our objectives. I actually think we've had a good day today with Leicester getting thumped. We are now big, big favourites to get top 4 now and who would have thought that 6 months ago. The team have done remarkably well to get into this position.

 

[Stacks]

Have to say Chelsea a player really well, they never gave us a second on the ball, worked none stop pressing us all over the pitch. We looked lacking in energy after playing Thursday. And now we play again on Wednesday. we made far to many mistakes today And couldn't cope with Chelsea’s press.
we clearly need some better Quality back up players to enable rotation without disrupting the way we play.

lets move on beat West Ham and get something at leicester and alls good.

Only 5 outfield players played on Thursday, most of them defenders. What was the excuses for the lack of quality further up?
Also, why didn't Ighalo start?

 

[soralapio]

Can’t blame Ole really for rotating.

No, the problem is he didn't rotate ENOUGH. Bruno has already looked dead on his feet for the past week, and now he had to play ~100+ minutes in an essentially meaningless game. If United miss out on Europe, serious questions need to be asked of Ole's choices.

 

[Giant Midget]

Really dumbfounded that Ighalo didn’t come on. Chelsea pressed us so heavily, we needed a presence up top to go over the press and who could hold up the ball.

It’s a game Fellaini would have been perfect for, but Ighalo really should have played. Should have gone 4-4-2, McTominay’s running to cover space and played fast and furious.

We never got going when trying to play through Chelsea and we never tried anything different

 

[vidic blood & sand]

Gutted. Was wondering what our FA Cup song would be.
Ah sorry wrong decade.

 

[ManRed]

Was a really crap first half. I have never been so disinterested in a Manutd game and it was a semis!! Too many stoppages, chelsea fouling our players and have no warnings, poor attempt by us to keep playing the ball out of the defence etc.

The injury really was the turning point as the players lost their concentration. This is the part where I was hoping Ole would be on the touchline and get team throuhh to half time.

Second half early howler pretty much ended any expectations we had of coming back. Ole throwing in Mason and Paul was just being naive at that point and should have let the game go on till 75 mins or next goal.

Hope Bailly is ok and can play in the europa league

 

[Joseunited]

Let's just put 4 past West Ham and qualify for champions league.

 

[12OunceEpilogue]

This sums it up. We had a plan to stop Chelsea and exploit their high line, which was starting to work for us as the first half progressed. Then Bailly got injured, and our lack of central defenders meant that Ole changed our shape. That threw the whole team off, and they took advantage of that. Once we conceded that first goal, the players' heads dropped, especially Brandon Williams'. Chelsea won because of our individual errors and injuries, and their extra days of rest.

We should just move on. We lost. Accept that, learn from it, and look to seal 4th place. There's no use breaking this match down any further as it doesn't give us much insight.

Agreed, though I'd add Chelsea did the ugly work far better than us and played pretty well at times.

 

[Shiva87]

21 fouls. 0 yellow cards. Amazing.

I was wondering what was happening and why our players were just not complaining about it. The ref just kept allowing fouls on our players across the pitch.

 

[Fully Fledged]

Move on to Wednesday.

 

[IAmAWinner]

I cba with these bottlers, everytime something is on the line, they give us this type of performance. Wouldn't be surprised if Moyesy does a job on us.

 

[Lj82]

I'm not upset with the loss. I'm upset that Ole played close to full strength. Under normal circumstances I'll like that he go all out to win the FA Cup, but the current situation is unique and we just played 2 days ago. It would have been perfectly reasonable, even desirable if he just rotate the team more. His decision to play most of the first team regulars backfired massively, and we suffer a physiologically damaging and physically draining defeat. Ironically if he rotated, we might have stood a chance of winning. The same players who played against Palace all looked flat. The only starter who played decent was Matic, who didn't start the Palace game. If we had Romero instead of De Gea in goal the game would have been tighter.

What's done cannot be undone now. At least we got a goal. Hopefully the team can readjust before Westham.

 

[Revan]

If Ole put out a weak team he'd be lambasted for not going for it. We weren't that bad until the Bailly injury, and then individual mistakes killed us.

We were awful until Bailly's injury. Unable to make 3 passes together, under 40% possession, had one shot (from Bruno's free kick) and Chelsea was pressing us with 6 players in our own half.

 

[LisburnWhite]

One win in the last 3 now after a great run. Just get top 4 over the line by hook or by crook and start planning for next year.
Don't even care really how we play just get it done.
Dave needs dropped, he cost us last year.

 

[Ronaldo's ego]

De Gea, Maguire, Lindelof and AWB range from under par to shambolic and they’re all first teamers, maybe we need to address that before worrying about back up players. We’ll get 4th and that’s about our level. Major investment needed defensively if we want to compete for top honours, otherwise 4th place and the odd cup run will be it for the foreseeable future.

 

[Falcow]

The two big advantages Chelsea had coming into this match played a huge part. Extra two days rest and not having to travel. Why was this played in Wembley when there was no fans anyway? Surely both should have been played at Villa park, no coincidence both home teams won.

We made at least 3 errors aside from both Ddg howlers. Wiliams, lindelof, Maguire were all made a mistake in the goals. So 6 errors in total. You cant expect to win with 6 crucial errors in the one game.

 

[Red_toad]

Ole should have played Romero, Laird, McTommy and Igalho, over James, De Gea, AWB and Matic. But that's all with hindsight!

Poor performance, terrible individual errors and badly organised.

 

[Massive Spanner]

Chelsea were the fresher, better, stronger team. I guess an extra 2 days rest will help with that, though.

 

[bsCallout]

Wrong everything. Changing a system that worked was wrong. Resting players was wrong. And then you play that players who you were resting. Why?
When you reach 1/2 finals of some cup then you go for it.

I am fuming here. Just when i thought that maybe just maybe i was wrong about Ole...
We are new Arsenal under Wengere. Top 4 trophy is priority and everything else is secondary. feck that.

Top 4 was always the goal at the start of the season. Anything else was a luxury.

 

[Anustart89]

MOTM: Referee Frank Lampard. New recruit to the refereeing team but did a great job for his side. Unbelievable that the refs in England are so mentally weak that they get influenced that easily.

We were shit and probably would've been shit regardless, but we weren't allowed to be good either as they were allowed a foul every four minutes with no risk of being sent off since there was no discouragement of persistent fouling from the referee.